


cornflakes

by softestrichie



Category: IT (2017), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Angst, Bullying, M/M, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, adding tags as I go, eddie lives with his gramma and needs a bit of help too, richie has issues with his memory and isnt coping til he finds a certain lil sweetheart!, they hold hands on rollerskates and heal each other!
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-07
Updated: 2019-05-17
Packaged: 2019-10-23 09:12:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 24,601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17680604
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/softestrichie/pseuds/softestrichie
Summary: richie has been struggling with his memory since he was nine years old - struggling with everything, really. when he's wobbling down green avenue at the weekend with his bendy legs crossed in rainbow rollerskates, ice cream on his chin and eddie kaspbrak's patient fingers 'round his wrist, he thinks maybe he is ready to start remembering.





	1. itty bitty

Richie’s always got holes in his clothes. 

There's no particular reason for it - a little mouse sleeping in the bottom of his wardrobe, a monster under his bed, an unfortunately loose grip on scissors - and there's no real solution, either. Just to get used to a cold tummy, and little slots for his thumbs. Holes. Everywhere.

“My itty bitty boy,” his dad would sing all those years ago over the curly, yellow fence of his cot bed, with his fingers poking and tickling through every little moth-bite he could reach. Back when singing to each other was that tiny bit less astronomical. “He's so bitty, and although he might look pretty, don't get too close - he smells real shitty!”

That's when he'd start the proper tickles - Went Tozier’s fingers were already right in prime position, and they were always very fast, very nimble. Richie’s skin was thin. He'd tickle his tiny boy ‘til the pair of them were purple in the face. That's when they'd start to quieten down, and Richie would take the collar of his jamma shirt up between his teeth, do a little yawn, and ask, “I don't really smell bad, do I?”

“Course you don't,” his dad would say in a heartbeat, racking his brains for scents Richie liked. Richie had a funny relationship with smell - sometimes when it was very strong, and pinched at the little wall between his nostrils too hard, it made him cry. Cry like a baby. “You smell like washing powder,” Went had finished. “Your mom’s special green washing powder.”

And with that, Richie would be quite happy to go to sleep.

When he got a little bit older, as in, got to school age, it started to get embarrassing. Richie had holes in his gym shorts, holes in his bookbag, holes in his undies, holes in his pencil case. He even had holes in his skin, if he looked up close in the bathroom mirror; teeny tiny ones either side his nose. Chips in his teeth and snags in his hair. “I just don't understand it, Bitty,” Maggie Tozier marvelled as she knelt on the kitchen floor, just before the smokey, gurgling dragon-mouth of the washing machine. Richie was seven years old and was hitting his hips against either side of the door-frame like a ping pong ball. Maggie was pregnant and still fussed with laundry. “I keep buying them and they keep getting torn. What on earth are you doing at playtime? Rippin’’ yourself to pieces?!”

“Collecting the earthworms,” he told her, naturally.

Maggie blinked at him, and opened her mouth, before wincing a bit as the little alien in her tummy curled and closing it again. That's the only way Richie could make sense of another body unfurling inside of his mom’s; aliens. “Well, that’s okay,” she said, after a few, hissing breaths. “Just play carefully. Enough muddy sleeves and holes. Can be your New Year’s rez.”

“Won't make a difference,” Richie whined.

“It'll have to, Bitty,” came Maggie’s now much sterner response, as she closed the washing machine door with a snap and the gurgles inside it hushed. “Spend all our money on you, you know, and it's not fair to ruin your things when they cost so much. If I didn't care whether you tore ‘em or not I'd buy a jet plane and a brand new mansion, but I can't, because you need clothes. So treat them well. You got it?”

Of course, all this got out of Richie was more increasingly loud whines and maybe some stamps of his huge, goosey feet, to which Maggie responded by giving him lots of sorry kisses, some extra bananas in custard for supper and a lift in her tired arms up to bed. But Richie wasn't crying ‘cause his mom was mad at him; he was crying ‘cause she had every right to be. He was crying ‘cause he was guilty. ‘Cause he wished he could fill all those teeny tiny holes overnight.

Richie’s eighteen today and almost nothing has changed, on this front. On many they've changed beyond recognition; his curls have drawn out thicker and they cling to his cheeks, he's got a nasty kink at the top of his spine and a doctor’s paper that reads ‘mild scoliosis’, his face is rounder, his ears are freckled. He's got a job and sometimes he borrows his dad’s car. He's a big brother, he's easily confused, he's loving. He's a brand new person. But still, Richie is speckled with holes. 

Maybe a little less in the clothes and more in the sneakers, this time, in the green apron he wears at work (a rather stuffy, dowdy drinks place), in his ears from where DIY paperclip piercings have gone horribly wrong. Even deeper, even less superficial. They still stress his mom out to the high heavens, still furrow her neat, dark brows and purse her kind lips; only she doesn’t tell him off for it anymore, just keeps it straining her heart. And that's where the holes have bore in by this point, gaping and curving and making everything shiver; the heart. Richie’s got holes through the inmost very core of him.

You could see them starting to dig down at him when he was about nine or ten years old, and came home with no bag, no coat and no socks in the middle of November. The week prior, when his mom would ask him again and again what on earth he'd been up to at playtime, Richie had started taking a new approach - “I don't know!” - and it was the one he used on that particularly blurry day. 

“Whatcha mean you don't know?!” Maggie squawked, running her warm, apple pie hands up and down his frozen little arms. “When did you have your things last? Did you have gym today? Did someone pinch ‘em?”

“I don't know, I don't know, I don't know,” he said in response to each, bouncing on his toes as he got excited by his mom’s gentle touches and sticking his tongue out at his little sister, who was now well and truly outside of Maggie’s tummy and was watching him with a head cocked as a puppy’s from the countertop. Milly Tozier, who'd never torn a single babygrow, and who liked to eat pancakes mashed up with a fork.

“Did you get rid of them on purpose?!”

“No! Cold!”

Maggie looked at him with an utterly lost expression; like she'd never been so failed for words before. Could tell when Richie was lying and now wasn't one of those times, definitely not. None of the loop-de-loop pupils or shifty feet or itches. None of the guilt. “Do you remember anything ‘bout today?” She asked lightly.

Richie shrugged his wonky shoulders - an honest little show of how he felt about this question. He could remember general colours and snapshots and felt tip outlines of it, like his bright orange shoes shuffling out of the car, his name being called in the register, his hands under the stream of boys’ bathroom tap water. Math in the morning and the sandpit at lunch. But that was it. Seemed like the effort of a day was such a migraine that all the other, teeny tiny curls of real detail had to sink down into the cracks as to make room. So he said firmly, “momma. I just don't know. Sorry.”

This was true. The most true a statement from a cheeky nine year old boy could ever be; he’d just stopped knowing. And he didn't start knowing again the next day, or the next month, or, really, ever again. 

“I’ve forgotten, mom, I don't know it, mom,” he’d warble like clockwork.

These little holes in Richie Tozier’s knowledge were as peculiar as the rest of him; there was no apparent change, no great blow to the head or thwack on the nose to have it all start reeling. It wasn't all at once either; something new and quite faint was forgotten only every month or two as he started growing. Only when put together were those big, blue-black holes so vast. And when he got to fourteen and the mass of them still yawned wide as ever, Maggie and Went took him out of school, because not knowing anybody's names, or how to get to any classes, or what books and work to bring in the mornings, was just getting to be too stressful.

("Richie doesn't do his homework anymore.")

("Richie's stopped putting his hand up in class. I don't know why he's gone so shy.")

From then on it was schoolwork on the kitchen table. It was dressing gown sleeves smudging the ink on his equations, milky cornflakes spilt on his test papers, never getting dressed unless he had to. He saw the doctor as often as his parents could pay for it (increasingly rare) and he had to drink a lot of water and go on walks every weekend. Richie’s little world kept having to shrink around his feet as his memory got weaker, and so did his heart; he cried most days and got very confused, and did a lot of pouting out of the living room window. Less of an ordeal than trying to navigate school, that was for sure, but none of it was enough to give Richie peace. 

No amount of pyjama days were ever going to fill that hole in his heart; none of them going to subtract from the fact that there was some sort of war raging on behind the curves of Richie’s ribs, and that there had been since he was born. There aren't many things in this universe that can heal these sorts of deep, cherry-coloured wounds. Some, but not many. Not many at all.

“There is a little bit of magic in all of us,” came Maggie’s mantra before bedtime, as she leaned her little chin on Richie’s shoulder and curled bits of hair 'round his butterfly ears. “I’ve got mine in my fingers, like when I play the piano and open your fiddly boxes, and some in my eyes for when I take pretty photos of you. I haven't got it in my knees because they crackle like krispies when I sit down, but that's okay, because I've got enough. I don't need it all.”

He'd have heard it a million times before and still be scrunching his lips and nose and cheeks up with giggles. “Where is my magic?!” Richie would choke out in between them. “Have I got any magic?!”

Maggie took his nose between her fingers before he could get it all out, lifting his voice up all goofy to tease him and shaking her head with a smile. She was good at those; smiles. Big, wide teeth in the sweetest way possible and lips that didn't curl in on themselves when they got happy. Pretty; it was a wonder, and half a nightmare, that Richie hadn't turned out the same. “Aye, I said everyone, didn’t I?! You've got it on the tip of your tongue, I’d say, and in your heart. Strong heart.”

“How ‘bout all the other parts of me? Where I haven't got any?”

She tightened her pinch on that little nose to keep him laughing, but at this point, Richie had always stopped. He'd have furrowed his curly eyebrows, started hanging off her every word, twitching his ankles under the ducks-and-geese-print bedspread. So Maggie would tell him, “you can find some more magic. You will find more magic, Bitty. Just like how...how powerful witches still have to get their knees dirty and scavenge for some...ancient hypnotic berries, some enchanted violets, some pegasus hair or something for their potions sometimes. There are things that can help you get better, if you look for them, and if you believe in them.”

Richie twitched his lips as he tried to understand this. “Like...medicine?”

“No! No, god no, definitely not,” Maggie told him at the speed of light, smoothing where his see-through sheets curled over the top of his duvet and shaking her hair back. “Other things. Just something to think about, n’night Bubba.”

Now, the sorts of things she had meant were such as new favourite songs, hobbies he'd learnt from his gramma, styles he'd copy onto himself out of cheap, yellow, kids’ magazines. She’d meant the little things that meant a lot. The teeny tiny pleasures that might give someone like Richie a bit of hope, might be enough to get him through the week with a grin on his cheeks. 

What Maggie didn't know that Richie might find, to give him that little bit of extra magic, to get his heart beating all bright and happy again, was a human being. 

God, Richie didn't know it either. He'd been thinking of doctors and diamonds and gold at the frayed, curvy ends of rainbows at first, when faces came into mind like petals out of the schoolyard soil. Faces, bodies, people. He thought for a moment maybe, if everyone had magic, then someone would have the right magic for him, and would hold his hands just tight enough to pass it over. Only took a second for him to have decided this was a silly idea, because nobody had ever held his hands and nobody was ever going to at this rate, so have rolled over and went to sleep, but it was still there. Vine-curled up somewhere.

In time, as the sun curls out brighter and the grass withers browner, Richie will maybe think he was wrong as a little boy; that now he's caught a glimpse of one of these magic keys. He’ll hear a rush of rollerskates over the cracks of the avenue, feel a gush of pink-neon air behind his elbows, turn and see a pair of peanut-brown eyes, and he’ll know he's empty, but he’ll think maybe that's not so bad. Richie will feel freckled hands curving like kissing-fish around his wrists and think maybe there's still a chance to fill himself with new things. It's been a long time coming, but he's eighteen now, and he's lonelier than ever. If this little superhero is ever going to find him, it ought to find him now. 

In Eddie Kaspbrak, peach lips round his curly straw and eyes tired and gentle, Richie will think maybe he's half worth it. And he's already on his way.


	2. goose grip

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> eddie keeps richie safe.

(“Can you remember what you had for lunch, Bitty?”

“I...I…”)

-

When Richie meets Eddie, he has the hiccups; his shoelaces are untied and his eczema is blotchy up and down the crook of his neck. He is sitting under a dining table at work with his hair pushed back all bushy, courtesy of his mom’s scrunchies, and pink-grey bubblegum cartwheeled into the flyaway parts of it. But Eddie is right there with him like a butterfly on his fingernail. And Eddie can't see anything funny in the teeny tiniest about any of this; he only pushes his milkshake across the dirty floor and covers Richie’s fingers in curvy cream; he only says,

“You're thirsty. Your chin’s gone shaky.”

This thin little lily petal of a helping hand is a first. It is the first treasure, to Richie; it’s the very first hand to ever hold his. It's the first he’s ever found to be as much made of fire as it is silk, and, most importantly, it's the very first, tiny, pink little grist of magic he’s ever known. Love.

Of course, he’d been climbing the ladder up to it for weeks - Richie will one day think he might have been forever. But it had properly, really started at the end of the summer, the mystery of the pretty, strong-legged boy on rollerskates, and it was the week Milly won a paper certificate for ‘math whiz of the month’’. Her kitty cat flannel pyjamas were catching on his collar, as she curled up into Richie’s side and showed it to him with sceptical fingers. Thursday. 

“You think they meanta give it to me?” Came her doubtful little voice.

Richie bobbed his heart shaped knee up and down - Milly liked it when he did that - and ran a wonky finger over her yellow, bawdy cut of card. She still went to school, of course. Still knew all her teachers’ names, and what days and times had them in what mood, and how to get away with sitting on her tush every gym lesson. Was very clever, and very shy, and liked to play hopscotch but felt too nervous to ask any of the other girls to play with her; Richie sometimes played instead on Saturday mornings. “Course they did, it says your goofy name. And they saw you in class when they gave it to you. And they called Mom and told her personally what a nerd you are, too.”

“But I never saw their sources. Someone could have flipped my name with someone ten times smarter’s, like a prank or a…”

Richie’s ears twitched. Maggie and Went had been arguing since about eight in the morning, when Went had trundled off in the car for work only to promptly return after being met by an angry mother and her daughter with a braces-impaled lip, and had been keeping very quiet about it. They always did; every fight was a whisper in the Toziers’ house, every worry pressed right into the curl of your ear and never leaving the cracks under the kitchen door. And it was all so hushed that it wasn't really, technically what had him perking up like a kitty cat. He could hear the side of his mom’s hand come thundering down on the dining table but that wasn't so strange. No, it was the low, funny chitter on the tarmac outside; it was that steady little tick-tock just beyond the curtains and on the edge of the avenue. Wheels. Small, noisy wheels.

“...And even so, everyone was saying it was a total pity deal. That I'm just so bad at math and it's so painfully obvious that I could never get a real award that they just handed it over anyway so I might feel a bit more…”

He nodded along and tickled the top of Milly’s little full-moon shoulder to tell her she could keep on talking, keep on going over the top of those wheels. Their house was on normally the quietest, sweetest street in the neighbourhood. The street most kids only visited for Sunday lunch at their gramma’s, and most adults only visited in their bus-ride lottery daydreams - “proper houses,” Went Tozier always said so proudly, every time they'd come crooking ‘round the driveway for their dinner. “Proper houses for proper little families.” And, if it wasn't going to be quiet before, it certainly was today; because today was Thursday, the last Thursday of the summer, when everybody Richie ever half-knew was well and truly gone for college. When everybody shook off their dust and started brand new; when everyone's world kept turning, and Richie’s stayed still as dusk.

His parents didn't think he was well enough for college.

Richie was still stuck under his bedspread with the ducks and geese printed on the top, the same one he'd been spring-roll-wrapped in since he was eight years old, and his dad was still having to remind him to eat all his meals. Still having to watch daytime game shows over cookies with his mom every afternoon and ask her what all the big words meant. Still only half-grown; only a fraction of a teenage boy. Thought he might always be left behind. Him, and the kid rolling past the window - the only kids left in Derry.

“...So really no matter whether it was a prank or not, either way I am still an idiot and I'm terrible at math and I should probably just -”

Richie squeezed that shoulder - goose grip’s what he called it. Like a great big goose had just come waddling out of the stream and given you a nip of ‘shut up!’ with its beak. “Jeezus pleezus, you’re crazy. They couldn't lie to you about it because you're too scary, you'd smell a lie a mile off,” he chittered, going back to his little tickles in apology. The wheels outside were getting quieter. “Then you'd bite like a teeny tiny shark. You're the best at math in your class, the math whiz in fact. Like a professor.”

Milly tilted her head up at him, thinking about something and touching his turnip chin with her thumb. Meant ‘I love you’. It was almost completely silent, again, by now; the skater was half disappeared and Richie found this oddly disappointing, as he shifted his ankles up below his scratchy thighs and leaned to put the telly on for Milly. He thought that maybe there had been a little bitta funny hope in something so small. To know that on the quietest, emptiest day of the year, there'd still be somebody with a light heart and a pair of goofy, wheeled shoes, curving love-hearts into the road that Richie had grown so sick of, wobbling over every hitch and crack as though it was all such good fun.

He wonders what kind of strength it must take, to be happy like that.

-

Richie thinks about strength a lot, actually; it's something that's been dangled like kitty yarn under the snub of his nose since he was small. Went says Maggie has a ‘strong character’, although that never seems to go down very well. Only ever says it when she's bristling at him with her hips in the corner of the kitchen for mixing the cat food forks with the dinner ones; when she's shaking Milly’s round little shoulders for tracking her muddy plimsolls through the house. “Just a strong character, your mom’s got,” Went would say, in that voice that goes all wobbly at the end as though there's a laugh sheathed up underneath it. “Pay no attention.” And it was always at the end of that wobble that he'd get a smack on the bum with Maggie’s polar bear tea towel, and the whole thing’d be forgotten over casserole.

He's thinking about it at work tonight, Saturday night, the second after the wheels. Rag-wrapped hand deep in a milkshake glass and knobbly wrist basketball-bouncing off the rims of it. Richie thinks talking is strong because, to him, talking is scary. Like when he watches allthe boyfriends and girlfriends, brothers and sister, mommas and grammas that sit in the booths at the back, and thinks about that lazy, comfy pink they get in their eyes when their mouths are moving. Thinks ‘bout how it might be to find these sorts of things so easy.

When it's his turn to dart his seesaw hips round all their tables, he’ll keep everything he's noted down so neat and close to his heart, like a schoolboy before a test. Post-its peeling off the bars of his ribs - a pink one with ‘make a joke’, a yellow with ‘smile’ a green with ‘don't be a pussy’. He’ll read them and nibble at the teeny tiny slip of skin curling off his lip, and try to talk. Try with all the magic in his tummy to be so casual.

“Did you know cherries are secretly flowers? And almonds are actually lil peaches? And…and...vinegar’s like…” Richie will stumble to every shirty young student on his lunch break. Every momma with a bouncing baby on her hip. Every family that's been waiting on their cheeseburgers that last hour and a half. But he always gets the same response, and it's never a real, proper one. Not like his momma would give him but just a very small stare. And he often wonders why he can't be as strong as everyone else, like this, strong enough to get a human conversation out of anyone. He wonders if he might have been before the holes dug in.

(“He just gets weaker everyday. He won't stop crying.”)

Tonight, the moon is the colour of dead grass and there's hot fog creeping up under the diner tables. Foxes snoozing on the corners of the woods just behind; only one lightbulb still working and it's flick, flick, flickering between its two last tiny wires. Richie’s usually quiet shift is decidedly very busy for Derry’s official ghost town weekend. There's been a birthday party or something else pink and sparkly up at the entertainment centre (a long, grey village hall behind the library) and subsequently an army of about thirteen, ribbon-haired little girls in the booths that want strawberry ice cream before their moms’ cars shudder the curb. Also an old lady shifting her heels around the front bar ‘cause she can't find her boy, a big, tough chunk of banana stuck in the bottom of the blender and a mouse hiding in the stock cupboard. Richie doesn't think he's been this stressed since high school - he thinks you'd have to be strong, for a night like this.

“We came outta the car and he must have gone flying,” the old lady is saying, with the tassels on her green bell sleeves tickling the tabletop and curly parts of her hair wrapped up in silk. Looks like a picture book witch. “Could you check the men’s room one more time?”

Richie, who has checked the men’s room just short of four times in the last five minutes, is starting to feel a little bit frantic. He itches at his ear and tries to twist that clementine tongue again, tries to be as strong as his momma says. “Do you have his digits? Does he carry his phone ‘round with him?” Comes his wobbly attempt.

“He won't answer,” she says a little louder as the ribbon-haired girls all squirrelling about the back start shouting. Richie winces. “He does this all the time, fast as lightning on those goddamned roller-skates and I can never just…”

Now, on any other night, in any other place, with any other feeling looped round his tummy, Richie would have paused at this moment and asked the searching old lady to repeat herself; would have wanted to curly-straw-suck up every detail about this slippery, roller-skating little boy for the rest of the night past closing time. He’d have sat his heavy knees on the stool next to her and his jaw on his fist and listened, listened, listened with his lips hanging open. ‘Cause he heard those rolling wheels yesterday as well, you see, and on Thursday night again before bed. Perching on the creakiest end of his mattress and pulling rainbow Christmas socks up past his clumsy ankles - can't sleep with cold feet - and straining his ears. Stiffening up like a ramrod as those wheels came past his house again, and stopping with his temple ‘gainst the headboard to picture it.

When he pressed right into it close enough, when he cocked his sleep-shaky head at just that right angle, he heard music. Something light and bumpy and beachy; something that Milly might listen to on the way to school while she played with (and half-broke) all Richie’s funny fidget toys. He heard teeny tiny but very steady little breaths between his mom’s petunia beds and blunt fingernails itching freckly thighs. And when he’d looked out of the window, and craned his neck, he'd only seen the barest clip of the skater’s wings before he'd gone again. 

Before he'd seemingly taken flight and gone off for a nap, right where the crescent moon curls like lamb’s fur. Fast little dove. 

And all of this is right on the tip of Richie’s magic tongue, just now, at last as the lady twitches her lips again to keep on grizzling over the bar. All of it tickles so close to the top of his throat. But it drops all the way back down to his sneakers when another noisy group comes winding through the doors, and the purple-badged birthday girl spills her shake all over the floor, and suddenly he can barely remember what the old lady said at all. Richie’s breath whistles in his teeth as he thinks about having to duck out and clear another table; about how much bone-shaking strength it's going to take to ask these kids what they'd like and if they were having a rockin’ night. 

(“I won't let anything hurt you, my Richie. I'm always going to keep you strong. Always.”)

He gives the old lady’s shoulder a clumsy little pat of ‘sorry’ as he eyes up the group shuffling into the back left corner. Three girls and two boys, and one yapping dog on a leash tied up close outside. Funny; they haven't left Derry yet, two days late must have been a bummer - one of the girls is wearing this on her face entirely. Her tangerine mouth is hanging upside down like a child’s fist-grip sharpie drawing and her eyelashes thatch low and, god, she almost looks familiar. Richie traces the curve of her pierced, pokey ear with crossed eyes. 

“You got stuff you’re busy with?” Comes his poor, forgotten customer’s voice with a cluck of the tongue, as she leans over and obscures the girl from view. Richie notices briefly now that the old lady’s eyes are the colour of peanuts and the shape of them too. Irritated, but pretty. Really pretty.

“No - I'm really sorry, I just...you wanted to order a drink?” He strains, as he tries to look at the corner of that younger girl’s ear again. She's got three, silver bangles on and they're tip-tapping on the table like popcorn as she throws herself over the top of it with giggles. Richie sort of knows her giggles, and that’s frightening him, because he doesn't know anyone's giggles. He doesn't know anyone at all. He doesn't know half of himself.

(“Richie Tozier, is that a Valentine's card?! Well, I never!”)

The old lady softens a little bit, funnily enough, but Richie barely notices. He's watching the girl draw fingernail kitty cats on her table, pink-powder cheek ruching up the side of her nose as her shoulder squeezes it. Flirting with one of the boys opposite her; teasing. Richie’s only seen flirting from under a crochet blanket when he's watching black-and-white Sunday films with his mom. “No, looking for my grandson,” he hears the old lady push on, as she slumps back from the bar again. “He’ll be around. I'm sorry to bother you.”

(“Who sent you that, huh? Open it, I want you to read it.”)

Richie blinks as the old lady shuffles away, not understanding what she's talking about, but getting too dizzy at this point to try and follow it up a little bit further. He's never recognised somebody like this before, Richie thinks, as he takes five, scrappy menus and starts ambling over. He never saw rays of something so familiar, so known, like a thorn-crown ‘round a head before. But here it is plain as day, just above the blonde, pageant curls of a girl at the diner. Schoolgirl.

(“Just read that, it's my name. You know my name, don't you? You haven't forgotten?”

“G-reta. Greta?”)

With one memory, comes two memories, and with two comes three or four. With this girl’s pixie ear and thwacking bracelets, comes tomato-red lockers and wads of pretzel-twisted bubblegum wrappers under a wobbly chair leg. Comes cold, metal notepad spirals digging into the backs of your knuckles, pink display posters of the French subjunctive, half-broken pen lids. Richie is walking over with these menus pressed into his chest like he's walking back about five years, and Greta turns to look right back at him, and God it's all too much. It's Greta Bowie. From English. Who the fuck taught English?

(“Sike!” 

“Whatcha mean?”

“Oh my god. It's a joke, Tozier, do you know what a joke is? A proper joke? It's a prank, dumbass!”)

He can remember Valentine’s Day, five years ago, almost clear as dew. 

Richie panics and his knees go bolting off at a ninety degree angle; he claps the menus down onto a half-terrified couple’s dining table and wheezes. Usually likes to go and curl up small when he's feeling overwhelmed - his mom used to find him in the bottom crook of his wardrobe with his toes on the wall and his puffy cheeks tipped under sweater sleeves - but he's forgotten that now. Richie thinks he might have forgotten absolutely everything, apart from Valentine's Day. Greta’s tilting her head at him like a chihuahua as she tries to label his face, and her friends are starting to spin on their elbows to see what she's looking at, and all of a sudden Richie’s practically cartwheeling under the nearest empty table, and spraining his ankle with a nasty whine. 

The holes never sealed up like that, before. Richie hasn't remembered a day of his school life since he was fifteen. Feels like someone's gripped him by the jaw in the shower and tilted him right up into the soap and steam and water, let it all flood in through the coils of his ear, filled his head with things he hasn't got a clue of. He swipes at his cheekbone as though he's trying to get it all out again, nose scrunching and scalp hitting the thick, metal snakes holding up the table, when he hears a shift.

Just a shift. Almost not a sound at all; almost as though the air’s folding in on itself a little bit, a teeny tiny rustle in the atmosphere. Time itself just stretching its glowing legs and wrapping Richie up in ‘em like a hot dog.

Eddie.

This is where it really all begins, you see; this is where it all comes swanning out of the cupboards and apple-dropping out of the trees. The mystery of the strong-legged boy on rollerskates was only really a little glimpse of something, before. An outline of a mystery, a dream of a dream, a comic-book-coloured picture of what a very bored and hungry and miserable boy thought might be interesting. Just something to think about instead of all the other things that hurt. 

But now, Richie is sitting in front of that little dove, and he is very still and cautious. The air tastes like bananas and the earth is spinning slower, and butterflying out of it all is a,

“You’re thirsty. Your chin’s gone shaky.”

The first key of magic.

Richie’s ears whistle as a small, toffee-pudding hand comes loop-de-looping out of the shade with a shake in its grasp and felt-tip love hearts printed into the knuckles. His knees shift beneath him and his head hits the poles again, and when he tips his chin up he thinks he might really have given himself a concussion; there is another boy under this table, if you could call him that. If you could call him anything other than a faerie. If you could melt your words into anything that'd do him justice whatsoever. 

“Pa-ardon?”

Eddie leans forward and all the oxygen seems to come with him; all the light and air and sound in the room knitted into his skin like ground sugar and following him everywhere in a great, big, swoop. His fingers touch the ends of Richie’s. “Thirsty, you can have a sippa this,” comes his balmy voice again. “Your chest is also bouncing like crazy and your pupils are humongous. You need to have a drink.”

Richie is only ever spoken to like this by his mom. It's her hands behind his ears so gently, her chin dipping into where his curls go all sparse and droopy, her voice whispering which direction he should take, and what toothpaste he should remember to brush all the way ‘round his mouth, and how many times he should knot his shoelaces. Nobody else ever handled his heart in this sort of way, unless it was to tell him off. And here's a boy he's never met in his life; plump arms spread out towards him like a phoenix’ wings, collarbones peeking out of his stripy, clean t shirt, face the shape of a strawberry and lips like peach pie. Heart aching out through his gentle ribs, and a patient look in his eyes. Richie’s read about angels, before.

“Thanks, I...I’ve just been working too long, I think. I think it's just too loud and ho-o-” Richie’s voice garbles as Eddie pokes that curly straw past his lips and quirks his cheeks up; he’s giggling. Holy Hell - Richie’s nose has gone the colour of peppermint by the time he's finished his sip. “Hot. Too hot. Just got a bit spooked.”

Eddie nods in the way a puppy dog might do; tips his nose down to point around the ground and bears his freckly forehead and lets that blondy-browny thatch above his eyebrows come falling. He doesn't even move like the other boys Richie’s seen before. Every teeny tiny twitch is deeply thought out, surely, every shiver a little love letter in itself. Dragonfly. “You should sit here a while, then.”

“Why are...what's...you’re drinkin’ under tables?” Richie stammers. He's usually not any good at stringing up his sentences with strangers and he's usually never with anyone this pretty, or in a situation so funny. But that's what this summer will let Richie know; that’s what it'll print into every spool of his heart and all in seaside tattoo ink. He will know that new things are still hiding ‘round the corners for him, shaking up the trees and squatting in the slopes, and that they always will be. That his world is never going to stop turning.

Eddie says, “it’s quiet,” with a little pinch of his ears and a shimmy of his legs, showing just the corner of his great big rainbow skates. “Loud noises are terrible for your ears. You want me to cover for you?”

Richie blinks. “Don't know what that means. I like your roller-skates. I think I heard…”

“Means I'll keep it quiet while you have your drink and stuff,” Eddie giggles, making those dragonfly legs tense forwards again and his back arch like a skipping rope, and his t shirt come sighing up off the bottom part of his tummy. He has a little mole under his belly button just there and his skin is the colour of beach sand, waistband of his shorts making a pretty hammock shape where his hips dip in; Richie thinks he needs a hospital, as Eddie's hands come over the curls of his ears. 

“We can sit until your boss or whatever comes lookin’, and my grandma.”

Richie looks up at him with eyes the size of soup bowls, the way a newborn baby might look at his mamma, or a mouse looks up at an ancient oak tree, and lets his sleepy mouth hang. Eddie’s put all ten of his fingers very carefully over Richie’s sticky-out ears and he’s shuffling a little closer, lips hopping up in a smile as he almost feels that heartbeat slow down. Richie has never been touched by anyone outside of his bottle green front door, before; he’s never been touched by an angel. 

"You feel better now?" Eddie whispers.

And honestly, from the base of his tummy and the roots of his thighs; the crown of his heart and the fire in his brow, Richie can answer this perfectly. The room's gone nice and silent under those little makeshift muffs and it smells like cheesecake. Knees touching with the prettiest dove he's ever seen, air cooling, diner emptying. He can say, from the bottom of his heart,

"hundred times better."


	3. pink cheeks

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> richie wonders if he'll see eddie again.

(“We don't usually see this sort of thing in children, especially not without any trauma to the head. Maybe...an overactive imagination? Games?”

“You think he's lying?”

“I’m just saying, Mrs. Tozier…”)

-

Richie doesn't see Eddie again, for a little while, after Saturday night, but he dreams about him - twice. He dreams that there’s water everywhere, water and dark, twisty sequoia trees, and Eddie’s holding him like rosaline ‘round the hips. “Lift your feet up,” comes his airy voice, pulling Richie’s wobbly heels off the ground with it as the dream starts cutting out already. “I’ll carry you home.”

It's strange, and short, but comforting. Usually, you see, when he's lying in bed at night and his dad switches the kitchen lights out, and the window glaze is too thick to let even the sound of the breeze in, Richie finds himself imagining he's not on planet earth. Pretending instead that he's tucked up in the crook of a comet, or swaddled in star clusters like a baby in its pram, and none of the things that hurt him all the time could be further away. No more early mornings, no more pining after pretty, marble colleges, no more making his mom bite her cheeks. No more funny looks or soggy bowls of cornflakes. And Richie will think about it so hard that he’ll half transport himself up there - that he’ll half turn into an alien. But when he closes those hedgenettle eyelids, and gets all nice and flat and ready to be truly lonely again, then sees Eddie instead of big, black holes, it stops him. Knowing that there is someone under that very same hot moon behind the Donald Duck blinds, someone who’ll cover his ears when he's frightened and curly-straw-feed him milkshake, always has that spaceship engine between his ears sputtering. Always has him wonder whether this particular planet maybe isn't so bad; that maybe he's just in the ditch of it, and he only needs to crane his neck, only needs Eddie to tug him up over the hill and show him the sunrise. And when Richie wakes up afterwards and sees it whistling through the slit of his curtains, his mouth tastes just like flowers.

It's a little bit funny, actually, that Eddie hasn't come padding straight back up against his toes already - after half a week since they met. Usually the same sort of crowd every day at work but Richie couldn't tell you anything ‘bout that. He doesn't remember their faces, no matter how wrinkly or beaky or cross-eyed, and he doesn’t remember their usual orders, or which windows are their favourites to tuck themselves right up to, or even how loud their children whine when he inevitably drops their sticky-cheese fries all over the lino. Can barely remember which colour underwear he’s wearing, today, let alone Arlene Hanscom and her oh-so-precise ham sandwich orders every weekend, though he might be able to remember how he feels ‘bout it. 

“Feeler, not a seer,” Maggie Tozier tells him, when Richie struggles home from his Saturday night shift with, for the first time in months, a story to tell. When Richie ties his dressing gown ‘round his rumbly tummy, crosses his legs neat as a cat on the end of her bed, and says, “Mom, I think I saw an angel, today.” Never heard his voice so honest.

“You’re just like one of those special witches, you know...the ones that can put their hands on your heart and know it just like that.”

“Empath,” Richie offers. He privately doesn't really like it when his mom speaks like this - speaks ‘bout witches and fairies and faraway, ivy-kissed magic castles - because it makes him feel like a baby. Like he's walled in so tight on the kindergarten schoolyard and the bolt on the picket gate is just too high to reach; like he watches all the big kids beyond it from over the top of his teddy-bear colouring books, and they all laugh at his sticky, runny nose and his tears. How funny, how sad, the teenage boy that still wears diapers. Richie would give anything for those holes to just let him grow up. 

“That’s it! That’s the one!” Maggie flutters, reaching out so she can perk Richie’s chin up with a loving knuckle. “You just...you suck up everyone's energy ‘round you, get to know it really well. My little yellow sponge.”

“What’s that gotta do with my angel?”

She gives that knuckle a friendly twitch to keep him interested, and shrugs through her flannel jammas. Got matching ones with Richie’s dad as an anniversary present from her sister, Auntie Lou, and the pair of them found it so embarrassing both to receive them, but equally so to tell her they didn't like them, that they'd been silently refusing to ever wear their sets at the same time all year. Makes Richie giggle, and Milly when he pinches her chin and tells her about it; he thinks he would love to be married. To laugh with someone like that. 

“You never tell me about people, usually,” she goes on. “I can't tell if it's because you don't remember them, or you just don't have enough of ‘em to remember, but...if you know him now, and you think he's an angel...he's gotta be special, right?” Maggie chooses her words a little bit clumsily, out of nerves; worried about getting Richie’s hopes up. They never seem to stay there long when she does. 

He chews on the inside of his cheek, at this, and asks, “you think he'll see me again?” as the clock shuffles up to midnight.

“If he's worth it,” comes his mother’s slightly safer little steer, before he's shooed off to finally get some sleep.

Worth it, worth it, worth it. Richie wraps it ‘round his head like thick, brown string ‘round a wartime parcel and rubs at his tummy, thinking about what his mom might be hoping Eddie is worth. Definitely not money, likely not publicity, and maybe not effort; not like Milly’s half-snapped, pink Victorian dollhouse, which Went had indeed deemed worth the effort of fixing, but failed at miserably, and insisted after half an hour was no longer worth this at all. And just as Richie’s green-painted toenails are disappearing off under the bedspread, and his chin up towards the foam, white stars stuck to the ceiling above his bed, he wonders finally if his mom meant love. That Eddie will come again if he is worth Richie’s love. Richie can't help wonder if he’s worth the same right back. 

In six months time, he will say “yes,” in a heartbeat. “I am worthy of love,” he’ll chirp. And Eddie Kaspbrak will quite agree.

-

It's Wednesday morning when he almost, almost can tell his momma that Eddie’s come flitting right back; when he can almost say proud as a lion that “he’s worth it! He's worth it all,” on day four of remembering every second of the weekend. Richie has half started thinking at this point that it had all been a dream since the very beginning, ‘cause sometimes he remembers one or two of those, and never does he remember human beings or what they have to say, not for more than a few hours. Never can still feel the peppermint weight of their hands ‘round his ears; never thinks about them all moments of the day, four times over. 

Richie thinks this is maybe what it's like to have a schoolboy crush.

Feels it in all its pink-cheeked, playground glory when he finally gets that teeny tiny little wink of Eddie, that fated blessing on the Wednesday. Midday. He's sitting in the middle of the two, crooked diner benches curled round the corner on his lunch break, and his pokey ears are plugged with Milly’s earbuds (which he's managed to knot three times over in the space of an hour). Watching a video ‘bout how to make a cat the size of a tree just out of clay and avoiding the large fry cook sat next to him, and wondering if his name’s Joe or Jon or Jerry, when there he is, in the pink flesh - Eddie. When that little voice he remembers so well over the road comes, clear as Heaven, 

“Aye! Stranger!”

Richie thinks he might be having a fever dream.

Eddie Kaspbrak, as starry as ever, is teetering right in the very centre of the dust and the tire tracks and weeds, knees zig-zagging like liquorice candy and roller-skates singing rainbow every time his wheels move an inch. He's on his morning lap of Derry with his hip popped. White, floaty shorts like Boston cream pie, hair like August; Eddie holds his arms out like a little penguin and calls again, “you’re still slackin’, huh?!”

Fairy-dust.

Richie hiccups with his mouth closed, teeny tiny pink buds whipping out of his ears and down the crook of his wonky neck at top speed; cellphone almost hurling face first into the concrete - thinks he’s been waiting for this for what feels like one pretty, particularly long eternity, as Eddie giggles at his speed. Been losing half his mind over all the healing magic in those fingertips; thinking, wishing, driving himself mad to the moon ‘n’ back over a milkshake glass and thick, freckly thighs. ‘Cause for the first time in his life, Richie’s had something to miss. And he's missed it desperately. 

He croaks back at him a, “I’m - going to go back in,” and tries with all the strength in his tummy to catch his breath. Some of that fairy dust must have gone creeping up into the curls of his brain; thinks Eddie’s got some sort of great, purple forcefield shooting out of his hips, that something in his breath or his aura or the wrinkles on his itty bitty hands has him so dizzy. Thinks this is maybe even how his dad mighta felt, when Maggie Tozier came tiptoeing down the school gym corridor for the very first time, with her untied Keds and funny, black-sheep earrings hanging down her neck. (Love - how he mighta felt when he fell in love.)

“Will you be making a strawberry shake?” Eddie croons.

“If someone’s feelin’ thirsty, yeah, I think so.”

Eddie’s heels flutter at this; the wheels whiz underneath the weight of them and, by all means, should be sending him rolling right backwards onto his bum just now. Sending him back down into the dry earth. But up he stays, cheeks all flushed from the sunshine and the birdsong and pretty little hands coming up to thatch over his heart. “Oh, fan-tas-teek!” Is his hideously broken French goodbye. “Save a stool for Eddie Eff Kaspbrak!”

“Eddie...whah?”

“Kaspbrak!”

And after the very crook of his voice has gone fizzling out, after he's barely curled his cream lips up closed again, Eddie F. Kaspbrak is gone with the heat, in true fever dream style. Gone fast as a jack rabbit. Richie can only hang his lips open in his wake, and finally let his muscles stop straining; finally let every overwhelmed little fibre of his body go slumping, and it needs it so badly, apparently, that it has him virtually falling flat on his hips into Joe-Jon-Jerry’s lap.

Eddie, Eddie, Eddie. Whoever thought that moonlight had a name. Whoever thought Richie Tozier, all covered in holes and rot and briny, salty tears, would ever get to know it.

“Watch my lunch, Richie. That's your boyfriend?” asks the inching-away fry cook, as Richie comes swooning backwards like a creeper vine and almost drops his phone ‘n’ tomato sandwiches for a second time this morning. Gets a faint, earnest little, “nuh-uh, I think he might be my crush. I think I got one of those,” in response, which has him guffawing and patting ‘round Richie’s wonky shoulders. Always coming out with silly little things like this. But Richie’s never meant anything so seriously.

He’s never felt anything, like how he feels when he thinks ‘bout Eddie, soft and calm and pretty-powder-pink in the middle of the road. He's never had a crush before. Seen it on the television and kissed into the pages of his old, green fairytale books, that’s for sure, the ones he'd crane his little neck at while they fanned out all pale over his mom’s skirt. “A tickle in your heart, a bumble in your tummy,” she used to read for him in bed. “When you love a faerie, everything's so funny! You might feel queasy and your head’ll get dizzy. But that's natural, you see, when your heart’s this busy.” Richie would clap his wonky hands, and hide his nose in the sleeve ‘round her shoulder, and he’d blush at the very thought of feeling that way about another person. Seemed a bit too human for someone like him; a bit beyond someone so half-finished, so bored and bland and miserable. But Richie thinks, as he whips himself up off the bench and the poor cook's knees to indeed save that tiny stool, that he’ll read that book again tonight, right after he's served up Eddie’s shake.

He thinks he’ll trace under every word with a crooked-back thumb, stick his tongue through the gap of his front teeth, and replace, under his breath, every little ‘faerie’ with ‘Eddie’. Eddie, Eddie, Eddie.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this took an entire while 'cause this last week has been busy as balls but hopefully it makes u guys' hearts a little happy! also for those who aren't on tumblr here's the playlist for this fic: https://open.spotify.com/user/katierosemcg/playlist/5CegsotTg1sc1bZlCGKgDf?si=3HfUTJKMRmimVY31h4Jv4A


	4. rainbow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> making friends isn't so hard; not even for richie tozier.

Eddie’s voice is soft as hot clay, Richie learns, when he gets a chance to listen to it for more than four seconds; it lilts around the milkshake glass Eddie’s pressed the rim of into his bottom lip and sounds a bit like those soft, summertime songs Maggie Tozier listens to when pegging the washing up on the line. “It’s like, I sort of look at things how I wouldn't normally when i’m skating,” it croons. “If I’m walking I’ll barely look at where I’m going, I’ll just sort of...register it. Then when I'm skating and listening to music I can't stop noticing every teeny tiny crack in the sidewalk and thinking real hard all of a sudden: I wonder how that got there...you know?”

Richie shrugs, and Eddie giggles, so he lets himself giggle, too, all nervous and croaky. A sound he's almost forgotten how to make. “I think so. I don’t really skate.”

“You don't need to, you have a very pretty town. Just need good eyes.”

“Haven’t got those either.”

Eddie’s neat ears flush pink in a grin. “Jesus, Richie,” he snickers, saying Richie’s name like the last word of a poem; the sinker. Richie almost swoons right back against the unscrubbed coffee machine. “You’re a difficult one, I'll bet.”

 _God, you've got no idea_ , Richie thinks.

They've been sitting here, like this, half-leaning in and half shrinking back shy for little over forty five minutes. Enough for a good three quarters of Eddie’s pink froth to be drained from his glass and enough to have the table room a little bit stuffier and fuller of the bustling teatime crowd - the Gregors, perpetually in a rush, the Faddens, perpetually and painfully the very opposite, eating at a rate of half an uncooked French fry per hour, the Hanscoms, the Gordons, the Huggins’, the Greenes. This funny little maze of sticky-fingered families and dishes Richie’s sure he’s never, ever going to have enough energy to get washed; that’s where he and Eddie get their first, proper chance to fall in love. That’s where Eddie had come flitting in as though he’d just hopped off the neck of a dragon (“cheers for the ride, Smoky!”) and he’d had fairy dust weighing thick and pink in his shorts pockets. That’s where everyone had paused from their dinner for half a second to watch this teeny, tiny vision of rainbow wheels call from the double doors, “this seat taken?!”, and Richie Tozier, standing like a spooked cow behind the bar, be so in awe of the whole thing that he’d sent a glass smashing on the lino. 

That’s where the very first people, the very first time in history, looked at that pimpled boy sweeping up glass on all fours, Eddie Kaspbrak giggling and crooning just behind his bum, and thought, _Jesus Please-Us, he’s got it good. Richie Tozier’s sure got it good._

Eddie takes up a lot of space for someone so little and Richie thinks he likes it more than anything; thinks that even the air around the wheeled angel on the barstool in front of him knows it belongs right there, knows it belongs to him. “But seriously, I like living here, I don’t wanna be angsty ‘bout it,” he says, with all that air at his command falling ‘round his arms like a pretty faux fur as they stretch over the marble, tip-tap the drinks levers, tinkle his milkshake glass. “It’s all up to you, you know. That’s what they say in psych.” 

“Ever hear ‘bout any psych doctors from Derry?” Richie asks. Eddie snorts and rolls his eyes. 

“See, that’s it. That’s your cognitive dis...discov-...destru-...distortions! Your cognitive distortions speaking,” Eddie harps. “You only feel sad because you think sad things about neutral things, which are all the things in life! Living in Derry is a neutral thing, you can’t choose it, then between skating ‘round it and picking out your favourites flowers or moping about its lacka shrinks, the choice is yours. I learned it at school, in New Hampshire.”

Richie watches him with eyes that are crossed and bossed but awe-filled; dizzy but loving. That’s sort of the extent of his role in any relationship, really, since he can remember; sort of as good as it gets. Like seeing The Taming of The Shrew in the theatre with his grandma when he was eight years old and not being able to understand a word of it, but taking one look at those big, curly paper ruffs all funny on the men’s necks and the plastic drinking goblets and the flowing, Jacobean dress skirts, and knowing this was the most interesting thing he’d ever seen. Like craning his neck out the window like a forlorn, lonely little old lady, watching some of the other boys on their way home from school playing Ninjas on the sidewalk, wincing at how they whacked each other and completely missing the game’s objective and somehow, after a moment, aching worse than he ever had to be out there playing like that. Richie is secondary. He’s a viewer, a jealous and interested and silent viewer, and Eddie seems to know this in just a second of looking at him; seems to want to pull him through to the other side of that big, silver screen he’s been strapped behind all his life with one, gentle touch of his hand.

Eddie’s holding Richie’s hand. 

“Whatchu learn at school, huh, Rich?” says his voice somewhere under the thick, dreamy layer of white noise that’s come hooding over Richie’s ears in the last ten seconds. Eddie’s taken to calling him Rich ever since he squinted his way through the little bronze tag pinned to his work shirt and Richie’s taken to swooning every time he hears it; that with a soft grip ‘round his fingers is driving him insane. 

“Not much…”

“Modest. I bet you had A’s coming out of your ass.”

Richie giggles hoarsely; God, he would give anything for that. His grades at home were mostly C’s and such and that was okay, really, he was at peace with that. It's not like his life would ever take him someplace where he'd need top grades and a painless little pass was enough, in a life like that, for a nice, quiet sense of ‘I did alright’. Only problem was the little bite in the back of his brain that constantly whispers,

(You know, if you hadn’t lost your marbles you’d have done better.)

(If you’d have turned out just normal you wouldn’t be snotting into your pyjamas over every tricky question.)

(If you’d have turned out just normal you’d be the top of your college class. You’d be okay.) 

He shakes his head like a dog and gives Eddie’s hand a squeeze, and then takes his other hand and clasps that one over it, too. Powerful. Richie never did something like this before. It makes him feel like, even now, with lost marbles and all; even in this miserable job and this miserable, uncomfortable body and too-tight little life, he is okay. Maybe you really can choose how you think about things. “I actually dropped out,” he says in a low but gentle voice. Like he trusts Eddie cares about the half of what he’s saying, at last. “Well...not entirely, I went home. I did all of my stuff from home. My mom quit her job and went all teacher on me ‘cause she’s really smart and stuff.”

Eddie nods, watching him like a baby watches its mama and - Jesus fucking Christ, is he blushing? Are his cheeks going all ballet-slipper coloured, are his eyes going all loop-de-loop? Yeah, Richie thinks drowsily. Yeah, Eddie’s flustered; he’s flustered over Richie Tozier’s wobbly thumbs on top of his own, while he warbles about what a big, awkward burden he is on his family and shuffles from bust up ked to ked. He’s surely got to be a figment of woozy, heat-wave imagination, as he draws their little pile of hands up further than his nose and asks frankly, “oh, man, were you bullied?”

Richie blinks. He’s seen bullying in movies, and one time at the dollar store; a little boy who almost looked like Eddie, come to think of it, all held up by his shaking shoulders ‘gainst the stock room door by a big boy snarling, “you cop me these pink shrimps or - or I’ll turn you into one!” Both of them had scrambled when Richie popped an earbud out from the skincare aisle and called ‘round his banana lollipop, “aye, you with your parents?” 

“No, at least I don’t think so. I'm not entirely sure,” he tells Eddie, who, yet again, nods at this as though he’s never heard such a normal response. 

“I understand. It’s hard to tell because it looks a lot of different ways, ya feel? Like, in the movies you’re either getting kicked in the head or thrown in fronta trains or you’re not getting bullied at all but it’s not like that. I’m not even sure either if I’ve ever been bullied because it’s...weird fine lines.” 

Richie, a little bit amazed by this point at Eddie’s ability to share and discuss and have an opinion (let alone a well-crafted, pretty little one, rasped wise ‘round his curly straw as though he’s seen the whole world a million times over) on absolutely everything, can only push his luck, with a, “maybe I can tell?” And Eddie, a little bit amazed at Richie’s eagerness to listen, can only smile and blush, and take another healthy sip before speaking. 

“I guess it was just general vocabulary,” he says, shoulders all shrugged behind him like birdie wings. Little dove. “You know, like, it didn’t have to be written anywhere and I didn’t have to get my ass beat to know what everybody thought of me. Fuckin’ high school. Just wherever I went in the halls and stuff there was that general weird, awkward aura of ‘oh god, here comes Eddie, nobody look...or everybody look, everybody stare, but don’t talk to him...or do talk to him, shout at him! Shout something that’ll make him cry! Don’t touch him, only his backpack, or his pants, you can tug on his pants! Only if he asks you not to!’”

Richie makes to tell him that this most definitely, perfectly sounds like bullying, and that if someone so third-rate as him can understand this then it must be pretty -

“And then there was the rumours...God, always the rumours, and the pranks. Who the hell ever had the bright idea of inventing pranks?! Always hiding my shit everywhere, ‘specially after gym, they picked all my stuff outta my locker every time, and...sorry, too much?”

Eddie pauses to see Richie staring at him with his lips hanging slightly open and his hands squeezed tight as ever, and shrinks in a teeny tiny bit. Doesn’t necessarily understand just now that Richie is admiring his strength, for mapping this all out over the dregs of his pink shake, for living to tell all of this; doesn’t understand that Richie’s heart is aching out hard against that misspelt (Hi, call me Richy!) pin over his heart for the teeny tiny Eddie Kaspbrak it’s currently working hard to imagine, hurrying down the corridor with his caramel head ducked to his shoulders and his eyes all strained and tired. Seems a world away. A horribly, unflinchingly nasty little world away.

And then all of a sudden not at all. All of a sudden the lockers around the back of imaginary-Eddie’s nervous hips are the blue, clean lockers from Richie’s own school; there’s posters of ‘get your Valentine’s dance tickets in the cafeteria!’ and purple football kit colours and, at the door of that all-terrifying, all-dignity-crushing locker room, stands Richie’s ninth grade gym teacher - Coach Black - drinking something that looks like fuel, shouting like a sputtering car engine, 

(“Tozier, you quit your whining and put your shorts on! You put those shorts on or I’ll tear ‘em to pieces!”)

Another piece of the puzzle. Richie chokes for a moment as this comes back to him, out of years of thick, black fog. 

“No, no it’s not, I just...why’d they do that to you?” He croaks. 

Eddie shrugs again, although not as poised this time - getting nervous. “Well, I was a little bit shy,” he muses with his eyes reaching the gum on the ceiling, and the fingernails of his free hand tip-tapping just under the arch of his bottom lip. Means he’s thinking, although not of ideas; he’s thinking of how to regain a little bit of dignity here. Richie will tell him one day he never met anybody so dignified in his life. “Little bit chunky, little bit small. And I’m gay, but…”

“Oh - ! I didn’t -”

“Yeah, s’cool. I think I better head back to my grandma, Rich, see you around,” he chirps quietly, starting to sling his thighs down off the stool and trying, very gentle, very embarrassed, to uncurl his fingers out from Richie’s needy little grip. Their hands don’t come apart all that easy; magnets. 

(“You put your shorts on and you run these laps or I’ll call your mom. I’ll tell her you were crying _again_. That’s what you want, Tozier?”)

Richie has never been told by anybody to see them around but he knows there are two, very faint little different shades of it, at least in the movies - knows one is smiley and coy, a ‘pick me up at six’, and one is little more than a ‘goodbye, I'm done talking’. And after knowing for the first time in memory what it’s like to have baby’s breath buds growing ‘round his heart, to hold hands with New Hampshire’s own, sunny little Eddie Kaspbrak and listen to him babble ‘bout cognitive psychology, he’s not sure he can cope with either. With anything less than ‘I’ll stay’. Richie watches Eddie wobble himself steady on those thick, rainbow boots with that same pretty twist of the knees as earlier, and feels something ache so painful in the back humps of his hips that it's got him setting down the cup he’d been scrubbing, and chewing on the bottom half of his cheek, and starting to bumble his way out from behind the bar. It's got him knowing that maybe Eddie is worth waddling like an idiot after through the door still in his apron, and giving the softest little tug on the elbow, saying, 

“Rainbow, I am really, really sorry.”

(“Up, up, up, you big sissy!”)

Eddie pauses like a swan. His skates were only just starting to pinwheel, knees only just starting to bend; the slope of the sidewalk back down into the town centre about to tilt under his weight and carry him on the breeze, let his dreamy wings spread and take him back off home to the moon. The wind even seems to slow down again with this stillness - as though all the air and the earth really is at his heels, really does tie into every itty bitty wrinkle on his fingers. Richie thinks this is well-deserved. 

“Whatchu call me?” Comes his flutter.

“Huh?”

“Just then, you called me something.”

“I called you Eddie.”

Those sturdy little wheels come whittling backwards with Eddie barely having to twitch his ankles; as though they’ve got a mind of their own, or are at least a teeny tiny, pretty extension of Eddie’s. “Nuh uh,” he says, making Richie hiccup. “You called me Rainbow, just then.”

“I didn’t.”

“You so did! Like I’m some sort of - of baked good.” 

Richie doesn’t think his face has ever burned so hot in the entirety of his life, as it does right here; in the sticky gold of the sunset and just outside the great, glass diner windows with the door caught half-open against his hip. He looks up at the sky and holds his breath, squirming, and all of a sudden the noisiest, lengthiest, prettiest little snort he’s ever heard in his life comes butterflying out of the heat. All of a sudden Eddie’s wheels have rolled him right up to Richie’s bust-out sneaker toes and his tiny, love-heart head is jerking up and down against the blue, and he’s laughing, laughing, laughing. His nose is wrinkled and he looks like a cat and he’s laughing. 

“Like I’m some sorta truffle!”

Now, Richie is laughing too; for the first time since being a kid, Richie Tozier is letting his shoulders slump in his work shirt, and throwing back his head, and positively cackling with laughter. His hip jogs and lets the door swing loose and everybody stares at him with a mixture of curiosity and secondhand embarrassment from over their shakes. For the first time since being a kid, he is happy. 

“Or a cookie! I did say it - I don’t know where it came - from!”

“Came from that - brain of yours, that big, goofy brain,” Eddie wheezes, hand trailing up from its previous, penguin position of keeping his balance to hold over where Richie’s cheek has gone the colour of fresh lava, as if this is going to do anything but worsen this. As if this isn’t going to stop Richie breathing altogether, like it does just now, as if their little giggles are only going to cover up the half of it. “Nah, I like it, Richie. I’ll be your rainbow, I promise. What you sorry for, anyways?”

Richie tries to sober himself into giving Eddie a little, “talking - bad at talking - haven’t talked in a while...homeschool,” to which the smaller boy nods patiently, and gives Richie a knowing little tickle with the pink side of his thumb. 

“You’re good at talkin’. I just got embarrassed,” he soothes. “Not exactly the convo-direction I was hoping for when I sat down, you know, but of course when I start talking 'bout one thing I start talking about fifty and I get carried away with the stories. Grandma says I should write an autobiography.”

There is a teeny, tiny bit of Eddie Kaspbrak’s energy in that gentle little cupping touch on Richie’s cheek, he is dizzily becoming aware. Tiny bit of real rainbow, not the cookie kind, and sunshine and stream-water and cedarwood; when the whole entire earth and all its breeze follows up around the little twitches of his faerie fingers, and they just so happen to twitch up against Richie Tozier’s face, it so follows. And all of a sudden, a little bit of the earth is Richie’s too. He’s not tucking in on himself, not trying to melt into the air like white paint in water, but stretching proud and purple as a peacock, sunflower-growing up into the atmosphere and claiming his rightful place. Under Eddie’s wise fingers, this little plot of the world is theirs only; under those fingers he really, properly exists. 

“It’s alright, really, it’s alright...your grandma's got the smarts. Just hope you kicked those kids in the balls - the ones that pulled on your pants and stuff.”

“Too short for that, but...stamped their feet up,” Eddie says, making Richie grin wider than the Atlantic, and batting his eyelids all taken aback as Joe-Jon-Jerry appears the colour of beetroot ‘round the front door, yelling, “damn it, Richie! We’re cooking and nobody’s serving!”

Richie turns like he’s underwater to try and tell him he’ll only be half a second but it’s Eddie who speaks, instead, it’s Eddie calling back brassily, “won’t you give me and my boyfriend a moment? I’m about to pop the question!” while keeping his hand holding dearly at Richie’s fireworking face. Holding like a nineteen fifties boyfriend all shrugged up in his leathers and singing ‘round a cigarette holds at his poodle-skirt girlfriend while he tells her ‘just chillax, sugah’. Richie considers seriously for a moment, in the middle of this exchange, that he might currently be in a coma. 

“Smart-ass, he’s on the job!” 

Eddie can only quip out a, “whatcha say about my ass?!” before he’s lowering his voice again, leaning in close enough to kiss Richie. “Do you want to learn how to roller-skate?” is his urgent little chirrup, as the fry cook rolls up his sweater sleeves. 

“Do I…?”

“Well, figured you don’t need to go to school to make friends. I’ll teach you how to roller-skate. Tomorrow, maybe?” 

It’s at this point that Joe-Jon-Jerry’s bulldog face has started curling in on itself to seethe at Eddie over the knobble of Richie’s shoulder, before yanking the curly boy backwards by the strap of his apron and trying to ease him back into the diner for the last hour of his shift - the most entertainment any of the customers, mouths all hanging open and crammed high with forgotten cheeseburger, have ever received for their money. And even as Eddie’s touch is broken away again, and those cup-candy eyes are winking at him under the glare from overhead, he doesn’t feel one teeny tiny bit faraway. Even when he’ll be slumped behind the bar again, tracing his middle finger round and round and round again on that cheek his new best friend had touched, there’ll still be a little piece of earth with him. A little piece of magic, just for Richie and Eddie. Just for roller-skating lessons and silly nicknames and weak knees - the most important things in the world, surely. And in this Richie knows that Eddie has given just the smallest part of his soul to him; knows that they are already ten times more than a ‘see you around’.

So he lets the fry cook wrangle him and rocks back on his wonky ankles, lets his shirt ride up ‘round the crooks of his ribs, and tells Eddie as audibly as he can manage, 

“Tomorrow, definitely.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hot damn, one month later! dont worry you guys I certainly havent forgotten this little story and wont any time soon. school's just been busy as all hell (I usually work on this piece in my free periods as thats when im able to focus and every...single...free has been stacked with meetings and homework for the last four weeks) but gosh im so happy to finally have some time! can you tell i wrote this while revising my psychopathology exam...hehe


	5. better than nature

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> how d’you gauge between making someone stronger and breaking them in half?

(“I’ll tell you what it is - it’s the parents. I bet they hit him in the head or something.”

“In Derry? Really? But...the father’s a dentist, a real good one...”

“Then you book your appointments someplace else, Sue.” 

“Ladies, ladies, it’s really nothing gory, not in my books. It’s nothing but that Tozier boy himself. They just pop out like that, a few of ‘em, just pop out bad. We call them rotten apples...”) 

-

Richie pulls out his old, blood-red basketball shorts from the very bottom of his closet as though they’re made outta cobwebs, right out far from his nose and cheeks sucked in like he’s holding his breath. They’re too tight for him now; not enough stretch in ‘em for his hips, he’s got his mother’s hips (although more lopsided, with a bump on the left, giving him a little swish in his walk that seemed like the end of the world when it developed), and far too much ‘round where they trailed at the tops of his fourteen year old knees. But they’re still right there. Still folded up neat and wrinkly as though he could stuff them in the bottom of his bookbag anyday still; stuff them in and sling his brittle knees up into the school-bus and head to gym first period with those weekday knots tied ever tight in the bottom of his tummy. Richie had sort of convinced himself that they might have just melted with the rest of his school things, with the rest of him; that they’d be a thin puddle on the dusty patch of the carpet by the time he’d got his closet door slid open. Convinced himself it was all the other side of the universe, by now. 

A worry, or a wish?

Coach Black’s ghost still breathes down his neck. Every quip, every lunchtime whistle blow, every ‘you’re last out of the showers again’ cluck of the tongue - every teeny tiny thing so impossibly huge to a boy that can’t remember his own shoe-size, not even after checking with his momma just before leaving to buy himself a new pair. And they’re so teeny-tiny-ginormous that it’s almost hurting; something so fully formed and vivid growing up sharp through the grooves of his brain out of nothing at all is almost close to painful. Richie can make out through his migraine a whole entire person, stepped fresh out of his childhood, and he can remember him for far more than half an hour. This has never happened before. 

“I can see why he wanted to tear ‘em to pieces, they’re _hideous_ , Bitty ,” Milly Tozier offers, up from her little spot behind his kneel on the carpet; she’d thrown herself to her tummy and wrapped her cherry twizzler arms ‘round those wide old hips, insisting on ‘helping’ the moment she caught a whiff of something interesting, something to work out and dig through. That’s what Maggie always says, when she talks ‘bout her children over Sunday barbecue dining tables; (“oh, she finds him ever so interesting!”)

(“That’s one word for it, Mags. It can’t be good for her, you know, seeing him like this…”)

Richie holds them gingerly up against his kneeling thighs as if he’s on a shopping trip. “True. I think everyone wore ‘em like this, though...I think I remember it,” he tells her, straining. Remembering his classmates is the hardest of all; a mushy, left-out cornflakes bowl of yearbook superlatives, of ‘here, miss’ calls in the morning. Richie almost feels cruel for forgetting them all. “I probably would have had a meltdown if Mom bought mine completely different.” 

“Maybe you just had funny legs, ‘uh?” 

“The way you use past tense there is interesting.” 

Milly squeals with laughter, birdie mouth pressed right into where you can feel the warmth of his rib through his pyjamas. She’s a lot like her older, wonkier brother in this sense - in the touchy sense. In the sense that to communicate, she’s got to press down her hands, trace her fingertips, pinch at corners; she’s got to feel and not see. Milly told him a long time ago that one of the girls in her cut ‘n’ stick art class smacked her smart ‘round the cheeks, once, for trying to touch at the pleats of her new, pink tennis skirt. Richie had cried a little bit when he’d next been on his own. 

(“Seeing him like what? Beautiful?”)

“Nah, they’re just fine now, for definite,” she manages to gasp out after a moment, when Richie’s milky hand comes up all arcade-crane under her armpit to try scoop her upright, sit her like a kitty cat. “I’ll bet your Eddie thinks so. Guys usually like girls’ legs, Kathy was saying it just the other day, so I think it’d be the same for fellas.” 

“Aye, we’re not there yet. I only made him a milkshake.”

“Not where? Shorts territory? Oh, Richie, you’re turning into Nana!” 

It’s a little bit funny, speaking about this, even just with Milly on the bedroom floor before dinnertime. Richie never really considered the fact that the day he’d ever need to would come; that he’d ever hop home from work pink-cheeked and jittery, knees criss-crossing like thatch top apple pie, that he’d ever think about what boys might make of his spotty, white legs, ever get hot ‘round the ears at the mention of somebody ‘til his sister started pinching at them. When Richie had thought about himself, traced himself on pause like a pink-pixel video game character, falling in love had always been greyed out, always beyond his particular coding. The steps and option buttons were clear gold - get taller, work hard, get a little job, get a big job, get a house - and the top, one-thousand-point ones eternally unclickable - fall in love, have first kiss, get married, have kids - eternally bannered with a little ‘sorry, this option is not available for this character’. ‘Sorry, you’ll have to upgrade, if you’ll just enter your credit card details in this neat keyboard bar then we’ll bill you a lifetime’s worth of self-erasure, self-doctoring, whatever the fuck it takes, rightaway! Thanks sport! You’ll be miserable in no time!’ 

And here he is, with the thousand point prize in his hand painless as ever, as he gives Milly a little nudge with the heel of it and almost breaks his nose leaping up to race her down for dinner - “last one down gets all the other’s veggies!”. Here he is, drowning in, ‘upgrade!’, ‘upgrade!’, ‘upgrade!’ as he rhino-thunders down the staircase. ‘You unlocked a brand new character, congratulations, took you long enough! Smooth talker with sexy legs and all! Bonus heart eyes! Free gazes out of the window! Flash him a pair of retro, rainbow rollers and, me oh my, his knees are weak as water!’

Here’s Richie Tozier, eighteen and wide-eyed and in love. 

-

Eddie Kaspbrak’s house is in the southmost part of Derry, closest to the Kenduskeag and the first crooks of the Penobscot river, crowned neat in American hornbeam trees that look all knocked into one another as raisins in the thick end of a fruitcake. The fence is little enough to make out the back doors over the top of it, and to make out that they’re wide open. That they’re curtained in thin net and clapping ‘gainst the walls when the breeze comes in heavy, and yawning open wide as a welcome-home hug. Richie hasn’t ever been this frightened in his life, he doesn’t think. 

Never even really been this far from home, funnily enough, not by himself. Sometimes he visits his grandparents in Newbury from the backa the Tozier truck, gasping like a heavy-eared dog out the window when his dad starts smoking and singing from the front, and his seatbelt starts leaving little ridges in the soft part of his tummy. Coughing and spluttering past ‘Massachusetts welcomes you!’ and twitching so hard he almost falls out of his seat the whole entire way; Richie doesn’t think much of road trips. “It’s important we take him plenty new places,” Went would always say, in that same, whispered little kitchen debate with Maggie he’d prop up every night-before their itty bitty travels. That same, awkward strain, same burden, that bent out of absolutely everything when Richie was involved. “You know...strengthen his brain and stuff up nice. Might give him some new things to practice remembering, get his thoughts all whirring into gears. It’ll be like taking his head on a run.”

Maggie would be perpetually on the other foot. She kept Richie soft; she wanted him to move slowly, to take things gently, to let himself be, while his dad wanted him to grow, and thrive, and power on. Richie didn’t really ever know where he stood on the matter. “You’re not a doctor, Went, not for that kinda stuff. How d’you gauge between making someone stronger and breaking them in half?” 

“A lot of the time they’re the same thing.”

“Don’t make me laugh. Who taught you that, your dad?!” She’d deadpan, a little, woolly shifting noise drifting out from under the kitchen door, one that told Richie, crouched listening at the first wedge of the bannister, she was folding her arms. (Just a strong character, his mom’s got.) 

His dad would squirm. “Well, yeah, but my dad -”

“Is dead. And an asshole.”

“Christ alive, Maggie!”

It always so happened to play out that, in some way, both of them had turned out to be right; whenever they’d leave Maine and the trees’d get a bit greyer and new, brown houses would spring up either side of the motorway, brown houses Richie didn’t trudge past on the way to work every morning, he had been very overwhelmed. The first time they left he’d clung onto the back of his mom’s purple knit skirt so incredibly tight that he almost accidentally pulled it right down, just as her short legs had dipped and she’d made to give his grandad a hug, which had earned him a little slap on the bum. But Richie had managed to remember it well by the end, he’d narrated very loudly all the different places they had their lunch and his dad had bought him candy from as they passed on the way home, and even on the way there the second time, only a little quieter. Richie had managed to feel just a little strong. 

He’s calling on every teeny, tiny ounce of that feeling, just now, in this funny part of Derry, curving ‘round the funny-shaped fence against the funny-coloured wood panels and looking up at each of its funny-gleaming windows. Calling on every notch of fire inside him there has ever, ever been, picturing Eddie’s fairy dust frame sprinting home ‘cross that same grass under his sneakers and trying with all his might to not keel over at the prospect. “You knock on the door and you say, ‘hiya Eddie, it’s plenty nice to see ya!’” his mom had briefed him gently when he’d come close to tears on the way down. “Or if his mom answers, you say, ‘hiya missus, I’m Richie Tozier, is Eddie around?’ Then if she asks if you’d like a cuppa coffee you say, ‘no thank you, water please’, and you’re good to go.” 

Simple, oh so simple. As if anything about Eddie Kaspbrak could ever be pinned down as such. 

He’s sitting on the ledge of the fence ‘round the front yard, rather than the other side of the door, when Richie comes tottering up the side of it. When Richie feels his heart go all boombox between the walls of his ribs and his fingertips heat up numb and all of that air suck out from under his arms once more, all of the air and light and space in Derry, in the world, come flying up around Eddie’s honey outline and stay there. Maybe it’s better to watch the sun hit the back, peanutty freckles of his neck like this, on second thought; maybe it’s better to see that same clean, striped red t shirt from under the roof of table seven go slightly fluorescent with how the hornbeam leaves are letting the sunlight kiss him, those tube socks slipping down all bulky for moving around too fast, just for a few little seconds before he has to gear his tongue into action. God knows he needs the time - Eddie’s knees are drawing up the length of his tummy and they’re stained with pavement dirt, and his chin is tilted as a kitten’s, and Richie’s not entirely sure how he is ever meant to think about saying anything ever again. His toffee, truffle cheeks are spinning on the green, they’re blushing, they’re puffing out and blushing, and the peach pie lips so neatly between them are calling, 

“Oh, Richie Tozier, I thought you might never come!” 

Richie has forgotten every tip his mom has given him since he was born. 

(‘His knees are weak as water!’)

The muddy knees up on the picket fence are springing into action; Eddie pulls himself down to hop on his tube-socked toes up to Richie’s green-sneakered ones, a rush of heat following behind his heels. Richie thinks a halo, just an inch above the part of his hair, wouldn’t look so out of place just now, as Eddie flings something heavy up against Richie’s ribs and grins all pink and wide like a little boy. “Didja find your way here alright? You drive that big old monster I saw in the parking lot, at the diner? Didja get all lost and confused on that funny turning, you know, the one with the -”

“Ice cream parlour,” comes Richie’s newly found voice, low but happy. He pulls back the parcel that’s just half-booted all the air out of his tummy and tilts up the bottom of it to find it isn’t a parcel at all, but two; two, white-blue, faux-leathery boots with wheels green and deep as ivy screwed into the bottom. Lace-up tongues and rhinestones on the tough parts for the toes, and teeny, tiny marker pen inscriptions on the Achilles’ heel pads, neatly and proudly curling out into an ‘E.K.’ There is something so oddly, overwhelmingly personal and lovely about these glinting white boots that Richie’s all of a sudden got that funny little itch of trying not to cry, just at the back of his throat and nose. A feeling he is currently coming to associate with Coach Black and his insistence on wearing red, broken basketball shorts,

(“You’re a real nightmare, Tozier, you know that? You’re driving the lot of us insane. All you ever do is -”)

only now, in the context of Eddie and his pretty, nineteen seventies roller-skates, it is much softer, much ice creamier. Sheathed in white picket fence and hornbeam branches and thick, dry, fog; two lonely, pink-faced teenage boys, swooning on the sidewalk, swishing in the sun, nothing scary anywhere nearby. Richie thinks he will remember these roller-skates, too, and he’ll smile. He’ll remember the summer of Eddie Kaspbrak and smile. 

“Yeah, that’s the one,” comes Eddie’s coy reply, candy fingertips brushing his hair back from his eyes. “Those are my old ones. Probably won't fit right ‘cause my feet have always been small ‘n’ narrow, and they're not the most fashionable ones I've got because, you know, I’m not twelve years old anymore, but…” He tugs on the silky, bottom bands of his shorts as Richie struggles to crouch on the hot floor - moves like an old man - before sinking himself down with him; takes those old sneakers for him and giggles at the sight of Richie’s huge, lopsided toes, the biggest on each foot having fought their way out of their socks. Pixie. 

“Thanks a bunch - you skated since you were twelve? M’mom didn’t even let me play hopscotch on my own when I was twelve…”

Eddie goes quiet for a beat. “Yeah, yes,” he says. “Ten years old. It was just a way of getting around nice and easy, not the most effective ‘cause we lived near the white mountains and there wasn’t all that much flat ground, but...my best friend lived right outside of town, the proper, rural parts near the national park and such, and it’s not like I could ever catch a ride so it was better than walking. He bought me a pair of skates as a birthday present for my tenth.Yellow as lemons - hideous.”

“Lovely, more like,” comes Richie’s shy little giggle. 

Roller-skating is much harder than he’d imagined, ‘specially with those legs of his; hard to balance normally let alone whilst wheeling all over the place on top. Richie’s knees knock together like ladybird-paint castanets and his ankles bend out all awkward once he’s started down the dry, empty road of Green Avenue, hips jutting, thighs shaking. Nose almost crunches the concrete after about ten, solid seconds of standing up before Eddie holds him very carefully by the wrist again - something of a signature move. Something Richie thinks about wrapped in the smiling, cartoon geese of his bedspread at nighttime; something he thinks that maybe faeries have something to do with. Yeah, that’s gotta be it, he muses, as Eddie leads him in a soft, bumpy line down towards the white spire church and where the hornbeam meets dogwood all thick and cool and dark. Eddie Kaspbrak’s gotta be magic. 

“Your mom’s pretty strict then, huh?” He asks, fingers slipping down across Richie’s palm to curl a little bit more softly between his, in all his faerie glory. Uses a voice that is nosy but embarrassed ‘bout it, and never loses itself under the rush of their feet. “That’s why she took you outta school?”

Richie bucks down low over a pebble; Eddie squeezes. “No - no, oh God, she’s the best. She’s great, she drove me here just now.”

“Then...uh...why, Rich?” 

It is now that Richie comes to the teeny tiny conclusion that, at this point, he really hasn’t got anything to lose; that he’s strapped into sparkly, twelve-year-old roller-skates, and he’s somewhere new without his parents for the first time, and he’s with a boy instead, a boy who holds his hand and looks like he’s made out of Ancient Greek marble and biscuit dough. Eddie, a boy who’d watched him choke and smash glasses and crouch like a child under bubblegum-thick dining tables, and had nothing to say about the lot of it apart from to jokingly call him his ‘boyfriend’ with a sweet-hearted hand ‘round his cheek. Nothing to give him but all the light in his heart. And it is now that Richie, strangely, newly, does not feel particularly embarrassed of himself; he doesn’t feel particularly hideous and silly and embarrassing when he tells Eddie, “no, it’s ‘cause I lost my marbles.” 

Eddie opens his mouth, then closes it again, then the same with his head cocked - more like a puppy than a cat, this time. Richie hears a very small hiccup, one that sounds like a soap sud popping in the bath, and feels his chest grow hot. Cutie pie. “What do you mean, your marbles?” Comes the equally cute voice of it. “Is that code for -”

“Memories and common sense and such,” Richie cuts in quick. “I don’t know...it was weird. My parents blew all their money on the doctors but, like, they didn’t have a clue. When I was tiny I just started randomly forgetting a ton of things, like people’s names and where I put my stuff at school. And then bigger things, and...yeah, I really lost my marbles. My mom doesn’t let me do much, not even go to college, because I am still very sick and weak. It was a nightmare convincing her to let me get this job, but with how much of their money I wasted...” 

There is a small, sweetpea silence for around thirty seconds after that; not an awkward one, funnily enough, which is saying something for Richie Tozier. For the boy who gets slightly sweaty and itchy in the throat when the ladies ordering their pink cherry shakes make direct, proper eye contact with him when he’s not expecting it. No, this is nothing like those times. It’s more of a respectful little silence; it’s Eddie just letting this resonate, just letting Richie’s life pan out clear in the fog of the air for a moment. Letting it have that gentle, proper wake it really deserves, letting it be as heavy as it really is, before they go back to giggling and chit-chatting and teasing with their cheeks dark. So many people have been biting off at the end of it, forever, been blustering in fast with “oh, I’m so sorry!”, “whatever did your teachers say?”, “you poor thing!”, trying to make it lighter, only making it cheaper, and Eddie is not one of ‘em. Eddie, silent and gentle-lipped and watching the side of Richie’s cheek, understands.

The first time recounting it didn’t hurt. The first time Richie Tozier thought maybe, despite the pain, he might still be a human being. 

“Nature gets bored, sometimes,” Eddie says at last. Richie’s gnawing on his cheek and sticking his bum out like a duck behind him to try and stay upright, as the road starts weaving and dipping out onto open field; Eddie is rubbing his thumb over the top of his wrist, very slow, very grounding. Paradise. “She plays with us, plays with our lives and stuff like they’re play food. Like those asshole toddlers that break all the Christmas toys you bought ‘em before the turkey’s even outta the oven, always the fanciest - the one you almost turned Build-a-bear into a crime scene for! But...yeah. I am sorry, Richie. You really deserve better than her; better than nature, I mean.” 

Richie dares to take his eyes up off the breaks of his skates for half a second, under the curse of his luck subsequently sending the toes ramming into the where the pavement ends within a minute, and flying hanging-mouth-first into the long, yellow grass. Pulling Eddie with him and earning a muffled little shriek, having that t shirt ride up once more, flashing those tiny, cocoa tummy freckles like seasalt up into the sunshine again. But, somehow, this seems as though it was the best response his body had ever built for him; better than the blushes or shakes or sweats or nervous giggles by a longshot, better than passing out at his grandma’s birthday party when Milly had shot him with a water gun, better than those stupid, stumbling rambles his tongue always gave out like thin mints. No, today, Richie’s instincts are on his side; the weight of his childhood has spread out a little lighter, a little creamier - still important, but easier to cope with - and as Eddie Kaspbrak’s lovesick face comes reeling out of the glass, it’s pink as taffy with laughter. Laughter like summer-time; laughter like youth. Richie rolls up onto his back, and cackles up at the clouds with him, and feels free. 

Richie thinks maybe he is free to move on; with Eddie, in the grass, green wheels whirring like hungry mice, he is free to start living again. 

“I’ll remember this for sure,” comes singing out of those happy, childish great belly laughs. It is now that Richie realises, quietly, that Eddie’s hand has found his again; it’s come crawling all shaky with giggles through the daisies back to its home. That’s a helluva lot what it feels like, holding hands together like this. Like home. “I’ll remember that I am fucking terrible at roller-skating. I’ll remember the grazes up my ass, I’ll remember you laughing at me like a teeny tiny asshole!” 

“Please! Please do remember me!” 

The rest of Eddie comes creeping up too. He adjusts his shorts with his free hand and, upon deeming them through crinkly, tearing eyes to be nice ‘n’ pretty ‘n’ proper, pulls his hips up into the curve of Richie’s left one. Richie can just see his face, if he pushes his own chin down and gives himself the appearance of a long, green caterpillar; he can see Eddie gazing up at him with an unplaceable, but lovely, look deep across his eyes. The one he wears a lot while looking at Riche. One that is gentle and patient and approachable but, still, respects its own rights; a look that characterises as Eddie as loving, but sensible. Giving, but self-respecting, self-knowing, almost a little fierce but only if you challenge it. Sometimes after a few seconds of the latter it’d curl in on itself all shy again, like when he’d been chittering all about high school from his barstool, but still better than nothing. Still trying. And Richie is yet again blinded with just how tough a boy like that must really be. He is blinded with strength. 

“D’you remember some things? Like...meeting me and such? Musta remembered me inviting you here?” Eddie asks, in the same tone as before. Richie, in awe of himself, finds his own leg twisting out almost of its own accord, and curving over the top of Eddie’s like two strings of a strudel. Strong. 

“I do, yeah, some things. Even further than that, actually...sometimes I remember things from when I was at school. But they’re teeny tiny, not enough, and I only think of them if something jogs it. I only remember them when something really, extra strong pulls it back up.”

“Maybe we should try do that.”

“What?”

Eddie props himself up on a sugarplum elbow, looking at Richie seriously; very seriously, considering their funny, whirring boots and linked up legs and grass-stained bums. “Maybe we should try and pull them back up, you know? Like...we could go back to your school, or the places you used to play, or try and track down people from the yearbook or something,” he says, voice speeding up. “If we surround you with extra strong things then you’ve got a much better shot, huh? Then you wouldn’t need a doctor to tell it at all. You could tell it all yourself.”

(A worry, or a wish?)

And Richie, dizzy with sunlight and hot and flustered and tired, Richie, wanting to move on, and grow up, and knowing he’s ready, knowing he deserves to start anew, can only agree. He can only dream up piecing himself back together like a pink, birthday jigsaw puzzle, piecing himself up into a proper person - an upgraded person. Richie thinks of Eddie holding his hand and feeling roses bloom out of the palms of it; thinks of Eddie swooning as he grows up into a new boy, a boy who can finally put being sick behind him like a winter bout of flu. He thinks of his mom sleeping well and his dad cackling, cackling like he does on the weekend, and holding his tiny sister under the chin as he mumbles to her, “when I was your age…”

Richie thinks of being better, and, finally doesn’t ache. Finally doesn’t wish it wasn’t so far away because maybe, with a little bit of love, and a tummy full of ice cold, pink-frothed milkshake, it’s not. So he touches Eddie’s cheek himself, he leans in so they are nose-to-nose in the deep fields behind the Catholic church of southern Derry, and says, 

“Thank you, Rainbow. Thank you very much.”


	6. buttercups

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> richie and eddie take a little trip down memory lane.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter is VERY LONG to make up for disappearing this last month! and also a vomit tw for the beginning part there is no more description after the first separation dash but it is mentioned again at the end as i am a slut for circular structures so! please take utmost care <3

“Hark! The he-rald angels sing...Glaw-ry to the…” 

Derry Middle School’s really lovely at Christmas-time, Mrs. Douglas thinks quietly to herself from behind the silver-green tinsel ‘round her desk; lovely by her standards. The place is tucked behind the leather factory and there’s a half-boarded up hardware store called Buzzy’s pressed up against the playground chainlink, with Buzzy himself, a leering, cardboard man sporting a yellow hardhat, perfectly square, white jaw and bird shit on his fingers, breathing down the neck of her cardi when she’s stood on swingset duty. Sometimes, somehow, in the brown gloom of early December, Buzzy’s hardhat gets an eerie sort of little grow coming off of it, as if he’s had a particularly bright thought. Sometimes the wrench in his hand is silver instead of faded grey plastic, real silver, jewellery store silver. He smiles at the swings and the swings smile back, and they flutter like swallowtails when the Christmas wind comes in wild; the grass looks like seasalt and it crunches under her pumps, and the children never push or kick. 

The children sing songs all lined up in the gym, and they share their turkey chunks offa dirty green lunch trays and they’re happy, Mrs. Douglas thinks. Derry’s little children are, just this one, soft month, happy. 

They all get pink ice-cream stickers in December, no matter whether they turn their homework in or not. Proper, shiny-coat ones to stick on the front of their workbooks as a little Christmas badge of honour. She keeps them under her teacup while they’re writing out sums - (if Santa’s little helper has forty four red crackers, and wants to give two, equal amounts to Mr. and Mrs. Claus…) - and sometimes even waits outside the school gate at three o’clock to watch them try and squeak out a ‘look ma!’ round the huge, sticky grins on their cheeks. “Just a little festive spirit, they’re all such good kids, you know, such nice kids,” Mrs. Dee lies proudly through her teeth each afternoon, as every, blow-dried curl on every mom in Derry’s head goes whooshing off back home for the night. Every easy-to-please, raspberry-jam-lipsticked smile turns off to the white sun, every ignorant little, “oh, I know it, ma’am,” fizzles until the old teacher’s left with nothing but Buzzy’s crossed eyes, and a breeze. Buzzy’s oddly glowing hat, and his thick, black eyebrow that seems to raise another inch each day and, just under the arch of his wrench, Maggie Tozier. The very thing she'd been avoiding, for the sake of this lovely little mood. The very face of those January blues. 

“You know, I was meaning to talk to you, missus,” she’ll echo every week in her miserable voice. “I was meaning to tell you how worried I’ve been…”

Maggie doesn’t go to the salon; Mrs. Douglas doesn’t either but she still takes clean, crimped care of herself, and she can just tell from the looks of this lady that she does not. More like a wet, whinging water spaniel than a pretty white poodle, like how Mrs. Bowie reminds her of, more like the wretched little sort that’s always got its bum at your heels and its eyes full of puppy-dog tears even after you’ve fed it half the tin. Her wiry black hair and eagle-claw hands, all wrung up together - just the sort that wakes you up when you’re napping after work with little whines and licks that taste like sand all over your nose and cheeks. S’exactly how Maggie Tozier hanging ‘round for a word outside the gates makes her feel, without fail, every time. Guilty, and half-asleep. Guilty and irritated beyond the stars about it. 

December is always her little boy’s first (and only) ice cream sticker of the year. 

“You know, I’ve just been so worried so I was wondering if I could talk to ya,” comes that fateful, hateful little wakeup call on the night of the sixth grade nativity play; usually something of a climax to Mrs. Douglas’ good mood extravaganza. When the little girls who sit at the very furthest desks from hers in math and blow spitballs and cut their sum sheets up into origami lily flowers are transformed, wasp to butterly, butterfly to dove, all sweet-faced in their golden net angel wings and wrinkly bedsheet skirts. The brash boys that the silly girls giggle at wear clean tea-towels on their heads and sing like pretty, red-chest robins, never so far away from their fistfights on the soccer field at lunch. Within this nest, Maggie Tozier’s son is not a brash boy or a silly girl, and he’s not good at either origami or soccer. He is not a blackbird, sparrow, nor a thrush, sitting here swaddled in what looks like a baby’s blanket and his mother’s arms; looking at her with eyes in slightly different directions like a round-mouthed, gutted fish. He is a nightmare. 

“I told you last week. Mrs. Tozier, everything’s going to be just fine,” Mrs. Douglas drones, that guilt wedging up high as some of the other kids come creeping up at her elbows to have a little look. None of their mommas ever want to talk so much. None of their mommas make Mrs. Dee look in such a grump. “Richie’s not going to be in any danger, nobody is, it’s a just play so I really don’t think there’s any need to -”

“It’s just, he’s really - um - tired today,” Maggie presses on. These little interactions are always made ever more painful by the fact that they are so very obviously unwanted - by the fact that one day, very soon, at least one of the two ladies is going to explode under the weight of them. Always talking at top speed as if to try and get it all out before they reach that far.

“Like I said, just a play.”

“Could you just make sure he doesn’t…”

“Doesn’t what?”

They look at each other uncomfortably for a little while, as one of the other moms comes bursting in to drop off and show off her little daughter’s handmade, pink-tinsel halo and Mrs. Douglas considers cutting it off here to go and fuss over this distraction instead so strongly that her heels even start twitchin’ in her pumps. God, why’s there always got to be one? Why can’t every classroom be made up of giggling girls and boastful boys and their lucky charm teddy-bears on their desks? Granted, they drive her halfway up the wall every day, but they’re just so _easy_. So easy to tame, easy to please, easy to understand. Tell the girls they’ll get sparkles and pretty dresses if they just read their lines, tell the boys they’ll get to miss math, and they’re all done and dusted, they’re happy as Larry! Richie Tozier needed patience and effort and caring, love and help and gentleness. Mrs. Douglas thinks little boys so needy ought to be put in special schools.

(She thinks they ought to shut up.) 

“Do a...get all…” Maggie lets out a little groan that, for one terrifying second, seems like they’ve gotten ‘that far’, and shakes her painted fingernails. Her earrings have tiny cows hanging off the chains - little cows that are actually white cotton pom-poms with black cow splotches and a pink snout painted on all tiny when you look closely. Mrs. Douglas wrinkles her nose. 

“He’s just having a bad day today.”

Mrs. Douglas chokes back a “him and I both,” with immense effort and chooses to purse her lips at the clock instead, a silent little ‘hurry up’ as the strawberry-red spindle on it gets closer to 6 o’clock - showtime. “Look, Mrs. Tozier, we already made him a whole, new special part that hasn’t got any lines but still gets to play at joining in on the fun. He’s going to be just fine - it’ll cheer him up,” she adds, in her best sympathetic voice.

“Special part…” Maggie repeats, her voice toeing the line again as she crouches down to where she’s sat Richie’s bum on the desktop, even though Mrs. Douglas says to her class everyday that this isn’t allowed. Those tacky fingernails tug at that baby-blanket ever so gently until Richie’s shivering in his fuzzy brown t shirt; his very special part this year is that of the Bethlehem donkey. Mrs. Dee had told him that the donkey was extremely important, because without it Mary and Joseph never would’ve made it to the inn in one piece and the whole bible woulda fallen apart, although she hadn’t meant a word of it. And looking at Richie Tozier now with his grey, poorly cheeks and swimming cap with its floppy paper donkey ears taped to the side (not to mention the floppy paper donkey tail taped to his pants), she couldn’t have meant it less. 

None of the other kids had to play animals. 

None of the other kids had any trouble remembering their lines, or saying them out loud, or walking in a straight line on the stage. 

None of the other kids were dumbasses. 

“Don’t you do anything you don’t want, my treasure,” Maggie’s mumbling away, holding those scream-stretched cheeks in her hands and pressing their pokey noses together. The bell rings and Mrs. Douglas’s own fingers have found Richie’s shoulders to chivvy it all along. “Even - even if you don’t make it up on that stage I’ll be really proud, Dad’ll be really proud. We’ll have pancakes afterwards. It’s okay - I promise - I’ll be -”

It took another five minutes to detach Maggie Tozier from her blank-looking son; another five minutes of tutting and toe-tapping and emptily reassuring, and even then, those scabbed hands were still all wrung up tight as ever. Even then, she stayed ramrod straight at the front of the classroom, eyes burning into the back of Mrs. Douglas’ grey-brown updo as she bustled Richie out of the door by his little donkey tail, already seconds from falling off or getting caught under his pigeon-toed feet. Could still even feel her frantic breaths over her shoulder, as the teacher gave Richie a shake out by the entrance to the ‘dressing rooms’, which were really just the sports equipment cupboards behind where the gym had been swallowed up by a makeshift, pink-covered stage. “Just make sure he doesn’t - doesn’t die!” Come their ghostly little whispers in Mrs. Douglas’ head. “Just make sure he doesn’t just keel over and die! Just make sure we still all have to put up with this bullshit for many, many more merry years, just keep him right there until he drives you crazy, yes please!”

She shakes her head, as Richie starts sniffling. He’s got face paint daubed ‘cross some random spots on his cheeks and forehead and it looks like thick, dirty soot. “You know what you’re doing, Tozier?”

“Yes ma’am,” comes his whistle, although he’s looking like he’s about to fall asleep. Pulling that silly face he always does when she picks him to answer something in class, like he’s so overwhelmed by her voice alone that he’s seconds away from sliding out of his chair. That silly face so easy to tut and snap at, as long as you don’t look at the eyes. 

(There’s rock bottom, in those eyes. That’s what it looks like.) 

“You’re the donkey, yes? You remember what the donkey does? You remember what sound the donkey makes?” She carries on like a military commander. 

Richie’s cheeks are losing colour ever so slightly; freckles get darker and darker as all the soft pink drains out of them and eyes dart about her face quicker and quicker. Mrs. Douglas gives him another little shake as Greta Bowie all dressed up as Mary goes filing off through the double doors onto the stage, knocking a basketball down in her glittery, netty wake and making everybody jump. ‘Specially Richie Tozier, a sore thumb in this little row of square-hipped, smiley-faced boys, a chicken amongst lions; a toad amongst tigers, a freak amongst…

“He - he says...heehaw?” He strains, with a little lilt of pride at the end. Or was it surprise? Happy surprise, Mrs. Douglas would reckon, pathetically, proud and happy surprise at having remembered something after all. The tigers and lions all penned in either side of him to wait for their turn on the stage exchange looks - which might have been cackles if there weren’t a teacher bent at the hip right over ‘em - ‘round their noses. She wouldn’t tell them off, though, she doesn’t think; looking at them now, she thinks she’d probably pull them into one huge, sweaty hug around the backs of their necks and just about cry into their makeshift cloaks. Looking at them smiley and jittery, looking at the shepherds poke at one another’s wooden crooks, looking at unruly hair peeking out of scratchy, mother-made headdresses like a good boy’s should. Anything but looking at Richie Tozier. Anything but watching that bloodless little face as he rocks right forwards, so far he almost headbutts her skirt like a fighting bull, anything but waiting for his inevitable, caterwauling, “I wa-a-ant my ma-a-ama!” 

No, he doesn’t make it so far today. When Mrs. Douglas’ exhausted, pink-mottled hands come to take his shoulders again and tell him it’s time to get on the stage, they don’t find anything; Richie’s managed to get his knees down on the floor and he’s wheezing at her feet. “He’s doing the donkey, missus, he’s walking like the donkey,” one of the other boys tries to explain as Mrs. Douglas stumbles back a little with a “wha- what are you - ?” And as those dirty hands come pawing at her skirt to keep all balanced up right, she thinks this might be true. Richie Tozier’s sad little ‘special’ part taking its sad little flight flight midway through some sort of panic attack, donkey tail hanging off 

(pulled off)

of his spud-sack sweatpants and soccer balls a good fifteen seconds away from crashing and taking the ears off too; wiry, water spaniel curls low and lank around his ears and eyes rolling. Only this donkey is more like a baby, it’s more of a foal, as Richie Tozier starts pulling himself into some horrible sort of foetal position with the green of his math teacher’s skirt still sticky in his hand. As Richie Tozier gurgles into the dirt and, in one, final Christmas miracle, throws up what looks to be about a week’s worth of school dinners. All like the centerpiece shot in a foreign horror film. 

“Oh - oh, God, no...that isn’t...this isn’t…”

“Missus, it’s all over my shooooes!” 

“I know - I’m sorry, everyone just go and line up on the…”

He is licking his lips, and falling asleep, as the sport cupboard descends into a catastrophe of flying tea towels and shrieking and the basketballs and soccer balls and tennis balls and everything balls all come raining like a meteor shower, one that’s going to finish off the lot of them. Everything’s fading out at the corners like a vignette, everything’s tuning out like a nightmare.

Richie Tozier is a nightmare. 

-

The little boy all passed out and poorly tummied in his donkey ears is eighteen years old now, and he can still taste the night of the sixth grade nativity play in his mouth, tonight. The moon is the colour of buttercups and it’s watching him from behind those soft, white net curtains, and Richie Tozier is sitting up almost a man with his forehead in his hands and his tongue hanging out. Just woke up from the dream of it all. From his sixth grade math teacher, fully-formed in bright, lurid comicbook strip ‘round the rim of his brain, from the middle school gym with its squeaking floors and blinking lights, all out of nowhere.

(“He says...he says...heehaw!”) 

But Richie thinks he might have an idea of a maybe _somewhere_ , with his teeth pressed into his knees all perched up on Eddie Kaspbrak’s bed. He thinks it might come from somewhere in Eddie Kaspbrak himself. From one of the little flower patches growing up over the underside of his tummy, the shade of the extra dark brown ridges on his eyes...somewhere tucked up tight into all that faerie dust he’s constantly drippin’ with like honey. He thinks it might have started growing today, the day of Richie and Eddie and his grandma and a whole entire meadow of little adventures growing up ‘round their toes. And when one of those butterfly hands of Eddie’s comes up just now like a giraffe’s neck out of the covers to tug at his elbow, tug him back down into the faerie dust for the night with a, “whatchu - what’s up, silly?”, Richie doesn’t think there’s anything remotely wrong with it. 

Yeah, remembering the past hurts. It hurts like torture. But it’s better to hurt for the night, to hurt quietly where it’s safe and sugary-tasting between Eddie Kaspbrak’s strong little arms, than to hurt forever. 

“Nothing’s up, I just ‘ad a dream,” he whispers, tip of his nose pressing into the tip of Eddie’s. “A weird one...it’s been a weird day, but...it was nothing.” His hair’s made this curly, smooth shape like a mermaid swooning back on a rock up against the slope of his cheeks and, for only half a second, he looks very graceful. A long-necked lady with white doily dresses falling ‘round her shoulders and dark hair and a nose made out of pink marble, all framed green in a Victorian painting, that sort of graceful. That sort of beautiful. 

He thinks, after today, after ending up here, there’s more than one of those: forevers. Richie lets Eddie Kaspbrak pull the curl of his ear right down against his heartbeat, lets Eddie slip his hands down his peejay sleeves to draw little massage hearts on his shoulders, and thinks maybe a brand new forever has just begun. 

-

Grandma Kaspbrak looks almost nothing like her boy but still has the same light in her eyes, somehow, as if this is a feature in its own right; something a little bit like a fox, or a doe. Something from the forest that is startled and shy and snappy and strong all in one, fluttering go of it. “You’re upta something, Eddie, you think I just came outta my mother?” came her young-sounding voice from behind a vase of baby’s breath and pretty, pale blue carnations, just this afternoon. “You’re doing that thing...where your knees go all bouncy. I always know you’re upta something when your knees are bouncy.”

“Aye, nana, it’s the shivers!” Eddie teases, flinging a freckly arm up like a baton twirler’s - flinging it up towards the scorchin’ hot sun behind the curtains. Sweetheart. 

She’s the same lady that had sent Richie off into the men’s room just short of a million times a few, long days ago, only she looks a little bit different now. Got her silk still wrapped up in her dark-grey hair - cornflower coloured, this time, cornflower coloured and thin and spindly - and even prettier, curvier sleeves on her dress with tiny ruffles like cupcake frosting over the wrists. Just this time she is completely and utterly surrounded by flowers. There’s a vase on every surface of the Kaspbraks’ living room that shines clean and big enough to handle it - the baby’s breath and blue carnations perched up on the bookshelf, sunflowers and roses and gerberas all in separate cups on the coffee table, iris behind the TV, daisies over the mantelpiece, orchids on the desk - and tiny, stumpwork fabric ones all stitched in tight to every cushion or cover stretching just behind them. This time that egg-yellow sun behind her grandson’s fingers hits her chin all nice and warm, and she’s not frantic or worried or in any kind of rush. It never stops fascinating Richie, how people can feel so different so easily, so different so fast. He’d give anything to be so exciting. 

Just like how her raised eyebrows and pursed, chary lips come loose down into giggles almost immediately as Eddie twirls his arm about some more, twizzling all pretty on the spot in his skates and keeping himself up with his free hand gripping at the waist of Richie’s funny cord pants. How she claps her wrinkly hands only to come out with another, “you’re not foolin’ anybody. Tell me what’s going on?” 

Eddie makes a little noise like he’s got a hot chili on the back of his tongue. “I just want a ride to downtown, that’s all I want!” he insists, knees still bouncing like crazy. “Me and Richie wanna hang out in the stores and stuff. He’s really hungry so I said I’d buy us both a sandwich.”

Grandma K picks at a pretty, dying petal on one of her carnations. “Sandwich from where?”

“Jeez - Poppy’s.”

“What kinda sandwich?” 

Eddie falters. “Just...ham and cheese.”

“You’ve given up on the vegetarian thing, alright.” 

The plan for today really didn’t feature any ham and cheese sandwiches whatsoever - or it might have done, but only if they got hungry after all the main work was swept outta the way, which was very likely. Usually Richie’s mom made sure he had a little orange potta purple grapes wherever he went ‘cause his tummy only took a good five minutes of walking and moving around to start rumbling. No, when they’d whispered over it so carefully in the long grass behind the church with their thighs all linked up and Eddie pushing tiny little clover leaves through the ringlet parts of Richie’s hair, pushing them through like a faerie weaving up an ancient, Irish ring, it was extra serious and undercover. Derry Middle School, that’s where they were going - just behind the leather factory and squished up as tight as it’ll go against a little, rundown hardware store, apparently. “You can get there quick ‘n’ easy from downtown and we’ll just tell Nana we’re going shopping,” Eddie had rattled off, pinching his tongue ‘tween his teeth as he tried to make one particularly frail little leaf stay in place. Looked like a tug of war puppy. “Then we’ll find a hole in the fence or something and we’ll stare in the windows to try and find something juicy.”

“What if there isn’t a hole in the fence?” Richie asked through a breath. Didn’t really dare to move when they were so up-close and tender as this, or speak too loud; just in case he’d jumble up his words and have to say his sentence again, or accidentally spit on Eddie’s hard-working fingers or something else humiliating. He didn’t want to let his body get in the way anymore. Not with its blushes or shakes or sweats or anything so stupid as that, not now, not this time. This time, his heart’d win. 

Eddie snickered. “Have you seen the kids ‘round here, Rich?”

“A couple of times.”

“They’re fucking awful…”

(“You cop me one of these pink shrimps or I’ll - I’ll turn you into one!”)

Richie had giggled with his chin tilted up at the blackbirds but this actually made his tummy hurt a little bit. Funny, he had seen the kids ‘round here, he’d seen them since he could see anything at all with that first, chunky purple pair of specs; he’d seen them out of his bedroom window and from ‘round the corner of his momma’s elbow the other side of the street and in the back, musty booths at work, jamming French fries as far as they could up their noses. He’d even seen enough to agree through wonky, grinning teeth with Eddie on this one - the kids ‘round here really _were_ awful. And, still, all of those glassy-eyed, pink-nosed staring marathons across the park had got him nowhere but his bed, wrapped up lonely and jealous behind his pink stuffed mouse called Bobbie. Richie had never once been a kid ‘round here. Not after a whole childhood had dribbled down past his feet through the dusty, Derry gutters. He realised, here, that the chance had completely and utterly passed him by. 

No more.

“Alright,” he’d said resolutely, making Eddie titter with a free hand over his nose - just to cover where it went all scrunchy. Sunshine. “We’ll find a hole. If not, we’ll make a hole.” 

“Ay-ay-ay, Bonnie and Clyde!” Had come that little angel in the grass’ song of approval. And that was their memory-hunting masterplan, all sealed and settled with love, that was the first step on the great, pink staircase they’d be climbing up the rest of their lives; a love story. A quiet, but proper, love story. 

The fact that there really, actually was a hole about the size of a Shetland pony in the middle school play fences seemed to sort of solidify this in Richie’s head - that there was something in those slow, northeast winds that was keeping Richie and Eddie together, keeping their fingers laced up like a duchesse pattern. Something that wanted them to go here, do this, start climbing the stairs - that said the angels were, for now, well and truly on their side. It wasn’t until the sun had starting setting all strawberry that Eddie’s grandmother had agreed to take them anywhere, and when they did, it was all strapped up in her pretty, dark green truck that Richie couldn’t have pictured her driving in a million years. Also couldn’t picture her breaking out of her little suspicions from behind the driving wheel and letting Eddie, all sunny in the copilot’s seat, slip on her purple tint glasses, but that happened sure as silk. They held hands more like mother and daughter than gramma and grandson, and once Eddie had started singing to her funny sixties, gospel-sounding music that he apparently knew very well, singing so off key and goofy and giggly into her old hands as a microphone, she’d had to start singing along with him ‘just because’. The pair of them looked all pink-tinted and perfect and windswept by the air con as a vintage, photo-booth slip; looked like they did that rather a lot. 

Richie doesn’t think he’s ever been invited this far into anybody’s little world before. Doesn’t think he’s ever seen life like this, beyond his own kitchen table. 

“Oh Richie, you have this boy be careful with you,” Grandma K had managed to puff out between giggles, in the little pause for breath she’d get when one song would be fading out warm into another. The little farmhouses through the blue glass were starting to roll out into department stores and Richie was sitting up as straight as he possibly could. Trying his best to look all proper and smart and like he was barely a week away from stuffing all those heavenly brown boxes ‘gainst his brand new, bright yellow college dorm walls. Brown boxes and a little ‘University of Whatever!’ banner so proud and pretty, right above his bunkbeds so he could see it every morning and know he was further than okay. “He’ll drive you up the wall if he’s not careful.” 

(“You’ll have to be very careful around him for a couple of years. It’s very overwhelming, you know...losing it like this…”)

“Don’t worry, Nana, Richie’s very careful. I promise he won’t let me have any fun!” Eddie had tittered, swinging his satchel up on his knees. Got a little pin just above the left buckle; a little pin of a big, brown grizzly with ‘bear-ly bothered’ halo-printed over his ears. 

“Better not. A real heartbreaker.”

“Nana…”

“All those flowers in my damn living room, you see those? Every week it’s a new boy comin’ in all head over -”

“Nana!”

Eddie had switched off the gospel music entirely at this point, as Grandma K’s wrists came crooking round sharp at the parking lot she’d agreed to drop them at. Got a big, blue painting of a mermaid printed up on the bricks, just above the ticket machine and forgotten back row cars, a mermaid with her eyeshadow all powdery on the left, winking lid. Richie had shifted in his seat where his hips hadn’t fit very well, and, for the first time, Eddie’s face was a blotchy, hot-poker red when it had appeared in the breeze to help Richie out all gentleman-like. Fingers took care of the belt buckle so careful and sweethearted it almost made him feel a little bit ill. “Your jokes are silly,” Eddie had told her, as she quick-fired questions about picking him up again from the little green pads ‘round the back of the driver’s seat, while still touching at Richie like he was made of purple-white buttercream, but for the first time, he’d looked properly ruffled.

“She’s only known me for, like, a year,” he’s explaining now, under the sunset, as the scrappy parts where the middle school fence has been torn to shit tugs at the waistband of his shorts and Richie’s embarrassed fingers come to pick it out like the pit of a cherry. Brave. “And I’ve only lived with her a coupla months...my dad’s side of the family. My dad died a long time ago so, you know. Didn’t really come ‘round much after that.”

“Did your mom die too? An accident or something?” Richie asks - horrifyingly. Can practically feel the burn of a clip ‘round the ears from his mamma for forgetting his manners like that but Eddie only giggles, and waves his hand past where his t shirt’s wrinkled up ‘gainst his tummy, and the sound and swish together reminds Richie of church bells. 

“Nah. My nana’s probably visiting her right now. That’s how I met Nana, actually, needing somewhere to stay and stuff.”

“You couldn’t stay with your mom?”

Eddie blinks. “Well - you know, college.” 

There’s a little bit of fog on the playground,tonight, low and thin and almost hiding ‘round the curls of the daisies but there nonetheless. Sort of like that really hot, sticky kind that’d come up like a packa wolves outside the diner the night Richie met Eddie for the first time; sort of like a presence in its own right. The swingset is short and skinny and yellow and there’s a slide with a cover on the top - “I used to think those things’d suck me up ‘n’ kill me when I was little!” Eddie had giggled - and nothing ever looked so unfamiliar. Funny, Richie figured when he was lovestruck and out of breath in his rollerskates that he’d definitely be feeling a little something at this point. Not like a light-switch, a little bit too clever for that, not all in a movie shot sweep of the cold, green science block classrooms to bowl him off down to his knees, ‘all flooding back’. But a little tickle of something. He’s been walking ‘round places from his childhood forever and none of that dug anything up from under the weeds ‘cause it all just melted into one, big knot of everyday life; walked down past the park and the convenience store and the coin-shaped frog pond far too many times as an unhappy teenager to remember doing it as a spritely little kid. If anything, it wasn’t like remembering the past when he walked those streets, but, in a weird way, blindly sort of reliving it all over again. Like his childhood wasn’t gone and tucked up rose-tinted and pretty ‘round the back curve of his brain but just reset; just back to square one, wiped out and reloaded and ready in all its excruciating glory to be lived through again. Like Richie’s bones would keep getting taller and sorer but, really, life would never properly stray beyond sixth grade, for him. Life would never really happen at all. 

Here he is, in a place far from everyday life - a place he really hasn’t set foot in for half a heartbeat since before it all churned up into mush - and the only familiar thing about it is Eddie Kaspbrak looking ‘round at him with the pink, perfect snub of his nose tucked up against his shoulder.

Maybe that’s more than enough. 

“Really, she didn’t mean it about the flowers and stuff, though,” Eddie says, finding Richie’s wobbly hand and marching up to the left side of the building; the red-painted side, with a little sign hanging off of it with ‘ten crazy ways reading makes you cooler’ printed in happy, cartoon colour. Biggest looking windows over there. “It’s just this dumb joke...old joke. I haven’t even ever had a proper boyfriend before. Only ever went on a coupla dates.”

“Don’t worry, I wasn’t really barely listening, I…” 

Richie is watching their hands like a hawk, trying to stir his head up properly, trying to think about what on earth he ever even thought about school. He wonders if tiny little sixth grade Richie ever thought about having a proper boyfriend, or a proper girlfriend, or even a proper best friend, like Eddie did. He wonders if there is another world where he is the Rom-Com Teenage Boy; where he grew up tall and giggling and proud, and he learned to play a sport really good, and he understood why people said ‘thank God it’s Friday!’ ‘cause those nights were spent laying out in the heat drinking pepsi and counting stars, whistling ‘bout college dreams, kicking his legs free up past the sand with his friends. Those were where the weekends started, and the weekends weren’t for staring at his bedroom walls or veggie shopping with his mom, oh no, oh God no; those were for cruising up to Eddie Kaspbrak’s front door with a pink, paper-wrapped bouquet of his very own. For leaning against his front door frame and letting him touch his cheeks again, letting him call him ‘pretty boy’ or ‘curly’ or something else fizzy and corny and over the top. And Eddie’d keep showering him in these little croons all night until they parked Richie’s car up somewhere calm and blue-lit, when he’d take Richie’s head right into his lap like it was made of syrup, and he’d lean down closer and softer and warmer and nearer until everything slowed down, and they’d stopped breathing and nothing made any noise and the stars had gone dim and -

“You okay?”

He jumps so hard he whacks his nose against the grime of the window - “fuck!” - so hard he almost doesn’t notice Eddie squeezing his hand a little tighter.

“Sorry, Rich, I didn’t mean to scare you,” he flutters, leaning his free arm on the thick window-ledge and then tucking his chin up on top of that, using his yellow-laced tiptoes. Like all those old drawings printed glossy into Richie’s Rapunzel book he useta get so much play pretend joy out of as a little boy, he wildly remembers all of a sudden; fanning his dirty, curly hair out over his fingers all moody in his bedroom and watching the sun until it made his eyes water down to his chin and musing to himself in a more pretty, oozey version of his own voice: _boy oh boy, when’s that handsome prince getting here? When’s his unicorn parking up? Richie, Richie, let down your…_

That very same handsome, newly-remembered prince tells him now, as the sun sets behind his kinky, candy hair, “It’s just that...I can sort of hear you thinking. Like, I always can. When you go sort of cross-eyed and your mouth opens a little bit, I can tell you’re thinking hard. It’s funny when you told me you lost your marbles or whatever ‘cause I think I always would have figured you have, like, fifty thousand million times more marbles than average. I actually still think that now.”

The part of Richie’s brain that makes him function short circuits for about five seconds. “I...oh,” is his pathetic little attempt to put any of the pins and needles at the bottom of his tummy into human sounds, which, in hindsight, is still much better than his following little stitch-up blurt of: “I...you...you make me very happy!”

Jeez Lou-fucking-ise. 

Eddie’s cheek bunches up against his forearm and, as if touched by magic, as if he really was a mystical, angel-dust prince all crowned and bewitched in faerie silver, all proud and calm on the back of his unicorn parked up nexta Went Tozier’s Subaru in the gravel, turns bright pink. And Richie has a wild little thought that maybe, just this one time, just for half a second, this isn’t Eddie’s own magic at work. This is something else from the earth, or maybe the air, something tickly and gentle and the lightest, purest, loveliest type of magic you could ever come across in a place so rundown as this. It’s Rapunzel singing like a little, golden lark from her tower that has the prince come running, after all, it’s her great long ponytail that has him soaring up past the trees like a butterfly to marry her. And _this_ , behind Eddie Kaspbrak’s seasalt freckles right now is, just maybe, magic borne from Richie Tozier’s own fingertips. 

Richie is making Eddie Kaspbrak blush. 

“Oh, put a sock in it, you make me happy too. You and your milkshakes,” comes its little charm from Eddie’s smiling, ice cream lips, fingers flying up to cover the pink spots springing up ‘round his face. Richie almost expects they’ll drop back down again sticky with pink-blue, magic powder. The two of them are moving onto another window to stand all shyly at the ledge of and this one is orange, half-covered with a great big orange display board of patterns all copied off of textbook diagrams ‘bout the Aztecs. History. “What do your marbles make of this, anyway, huh? Anything silly happen in this classroom? Ever fart during role call or somethin’?”

(“Richie’s stopped putting his hand up in class. I don’t know why he’s gone so shy.”) 

“Probably followed through with it,” Richie teases, wrinkling his nose and drawing little wriggly shapes with his pupils over all the seats beyond the glass. Like he’s trying to trace bodies; trying to let his head take the wheel, fill in the shape of the class clown, the shy girl in the corner, the town bully, himself, please God, himself. There’s a little flutter down by his pants where Eddie’s taken their thatched up hands, and he’s guiding them right up to his own chest. Looking at Richie patient as a curly-furred guard puppy and letting all his knuckles touch over where his t shirt’s all loose; letting them take in his heartbeat, asking, “what did you look like in middle school, anyways?”

“Big, purple glasses,” he hears himself say, stirring a giggle out of that little dove below his fingers almost straightaway and a blink of surprise from himself. His momma has a lot of scrapbooks, big, peely golden ones with polaroids and digital prints rolled out neat like jewels in a crown, but Richie’s only ever thumbed through them once or twice. There was always something a little bit scary to him, about looking at his old pictures, looking at his first day of school, twelfth birthday, first wobbly tooth, first (and last, due to a piece of seaweed believed-to-be-jellyfish that made its way down his trunks) swim in the sea; always something that made the curly little hairs on his arms and legs stand up about looking at a boy he knows nothing about, a boy with his name and mom and dad and heart and life. Almost like he’s looking at an imposter. Almost like he is one. “Big purple glasses and bowlcut...only the bowlcut was really insanely curly and puffy, bushy, and - and went up really weirdly high around my ears? It was so stupid around my ears, they always stuck out like an Irish pixie’s or somethin’. My mom was really bad at cutting hair but apparently I’d throw a fit if she tried to take me to the salon, I was bad with strangers, always been bad with strangers...I had green braces, fluorescent obviously, like a nerd, and...and when I was ten I had headgear on the front of them. Apparently that made me wanna leave the country but I didn’t need it for very long. I used to call it a ‘muzzle’, like for a puppy, ‘cause I’d seen in cartoons before where the really bad puppies got a big metal thing across their teeth to stop them going crazy and couldn’t break the association! And my parents kept patting me on the head and telling me to play dead just to tease when I started on it, only then I started crying, ‘cause I was scared it had actually turned me into a dog, and…and when I was in the school nativity play, I was the donkey. Can you believe it? The donkey?! Greta Bowie was gonna sit on my back while I said my only line, it was hee-haw, but we don’t have any pictures of that because I had a big tantrum and I threw up everywhere and...so...I don’t how I thought of…”

“Rich?”

“Yeah? Sorry, was I -” 

That flutter down around Richie’s fingers is back, and it seems to have gone a little bit helter skelter. A little loop-de-loop, a fairground bumper car move, all haywire down by his fingernails. Or maybe it’s just the breeze, maybe it’s Richie’s own, miserably, miserably half-dead brain, maybe it’s heat stroke or nerves or pure hallucination, God damn it.

(“He does have a vivid imagination after all…”)

Because this time he can feel Eddie’s soft, frothy energy and its taking his fingers up again, only up higher and higher than his chest, his heart, his collarbones, higher than it feels like they’re supposed to go. And maybe it took ‘em right up to Heaven. Richie remembers so much, he remembers the Aztec patterns and the swingset and his paper donkey ears and Mrs. Douglas’ green skirt and, through all of it, all he wants to think about is Eddie’s little heaven. That maybe Eddie’s angels wings had just come drifting out from under his clean tee shirt, white and cottony and soft and lovely and wrapped up in glitter paint, paper donkey tails, hanging on by a dirty scrappa sellotape, pulled off by all the hungry doves he’s feeding up above the clouds ‘cause, Jesus Christ, those fingers land higher than the sun on his lips. 

He presses Richie’s knuckles to his lips, and he kisses them, he kisses them with all the gentle spirit in the world, saying, “Richie, you’re crying.” 

Richie has lost all feeling in his legs.

“I’m...then my...my teacher...I…my teachers didn’t like me, I wanted them to like me so bad! I tried really, really extra hard to make them like me, Eddie, but I kept forgetting my homework and - and falling asleep and crying and messing everything up and...I messed _so much_ up, for my parents, I hurt my mom so much. We had tests every Friday, little mini tests, and I could barely write my own name, I don’t know why! I don’t know why I got like that! I don’t know what happened at all, I just know how I felt all the time...I can remember all of that..but I don’t know why, I…” 

He doesn’t need it. He doesn’t need his legs or any of his marbles or senses or thoughts and, thank God for that, because he thinks Eddie Kaspbrak and his kisses and the strong, pepper arms now coming in warm around his waist where he’s starting to fall down onto his knees ‘gainst the concrete have wiped him out, completely and utterly, for good. Richie’s cord pants are slipping down where his hips are a little bit too wide for them; his bum is on the concrete, and then it’s on top of Eddie’s soft, strong thighs. His hips are all covered up safe by those hands he can’t stop thinking about, those hands that just curled up nice and careful over his ears last week and seemed to have silenced something loud and horrible for good. One of them keeps down on his left hip and the other crawls up like a green, curly-straw creeper vine to cup Richie’s right cheek.

“You think you wanna go home now, sweetheart?” is how today’s little baby-step adventure ends, just beneath the history classroom window and crouched down wonky over the playground daisies and concrete and worms. And when Richie’s head finds the soft part of Eddie’s shoulder, and his eyes start closing against the sun, closing against this tiny angel in the grass’ heartbeat, he says, “yes,” as to mean only and without a doubt, to stay right here for a little while longer. Just stay with Eddie. That sounds a little like home.

A brand new forever. Nice.

**Author's Note:**

> had bits of this story laying around since like august and went through them all with grace months ago but i'm ready to start rollin' now. bon appétit! c:
> 
> tumblr - lovedrichie  
> insta - pixielesbian


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